View from across the data lake – Sarah Curran Usher MBE on how retailers can leverage insight to inform CX strategies
Having set up one of the first fashion pure-plays, Mywardrobe.com, and later launching Very’s luxury online fashion offer, Sarah Curran Usher MBE knows first-hand the role of tech – and specifically personalisation – in driving the CX needed for long-term success and loyalty in retail and ecommerce.
Sarah is now GM EMEA of True Fit, a data-driven personalisation platform for fashion, which helps retailers and brands interpret complex customer data to drive insights that improve personalisation and CX at each point of the shopping journey. Since her arrival, True Fit’s shopper adoption has grown exponentially, nearing 200million registered users, and demand for personalisation on the platform is up 152%.
We caught up with her on the role of data in informing how retailers shape customer experience, so they can build a truly individual and connected view of the shopper to drive up loyalty and build customer lifetime value. Here’s what she had to say:
Shoppers often face a frustration when it comes to finding clothes to fit, that retailers and brands don’t ‘get them’. And when they add size, fit, and style attributes into the mix, then the water is muddied further.
Brands and retailers will say that they really want to be the ones to ‘get’ their customers, but often they end up marketing blindly to predefined cohorts based on little or no information or executing campaigns based on ‘best guess’ scenarios and clunky segmentation that doesn’t match the reality of who their shoppers are. This is because they think that it is almost impossible to satisfy consumers that are fragmenting into what we call ‘The Niche of One’.
It certainly looks complicated; consider the many valuable data points that brands or retailers do not know about their customers, and which they will need if they are to start personalising their products and marketing to drive improvements in CX:
A customer’s preference on style, colours, fit, and size
What they feel about sustainability and how it affects how they shop
Their delivery preferences, whether to store or home
Their communications preferences
Their public persona on social media
The price points in which they shop
How they shop inside and outside your brand
It looks complicated because it is often assumed that much of this information is difficult or impossible to extract. But customers want to share this data because they want the retailer to get it right. The road to loyalty goes in two directions - what we call the loyalty loop - where retailers gain an increasingly deeper understanding of their customers as those customers interact, buy, and feed back. This then enables the retailer to only display products, prices, and packages that they know the customer is looking for.
Using data to learn about a customer and market in a meaningful way strikes me as one of the biggest competitive opportunities in retail still available. Consumers don’t just wear brands, they own and live them, and they are telling the world what they want through Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and blog sites… but are brands listening?
The rewards are significant because retailers can then act in near real time based on what they are seeing on particular spending trends so they can make seasonal product drops rather than holding stock for months ahead. They can identify their full price shoppers as opposed to discount-only shoppers, and play to their strengths.
This insight might reveal new potential segments such as customers who want to buy some things second-hand or rent rather than buy. Brands are experimenting with this, but they are reading the macro market trends rather than tuning into individual customers’ preferences.
Privacy is important but only to the extent that customers need to trust retailers not to share it with the wrong people. (This does not mean they do not want to share it if the rewards are visible and generous.) The most generous reward a brand can give is showing their customers that they understand exactly what they want.
How many companies were launched by people who said they could not find what they wanted on the internet so they did it themselves? The answer, of course, is many. Here is the clue for brands to respond by creating a more level and data-rich playing field on which both they and their customers can play as equals.
But the bottom line is higher revenue: personalised communications based on insight into individual preferences translates to higher conversion, increased purchase frequency, higher average order value over time, and lower returns, leading to a positive life time value measure. And of course, current investment in acquisition, remarketing, and returns management can all reduce as retailers get it right first time more and more often.
Sarah Curran-Usher, MD EMEA at True Fit
Sarah Curran-Usher MBE, is MD EMEA at True Fit, non-executive director at French Connection, and previously also at Pimkie.
In 2013, Sarah joined Shop Direct as a luxury director with a remit to accelerate the development of its premium branded fashion and beauty and went on to spearhead the launch of its premium e-tailer, ‘Very Exclusive’.
A former sub-editor at The Times, Sarah also co-founded her own affordable luxury ecommerce site, My-Wardrobe, and in 2013, received an MBE for her services to fashion.