Customer Experience Audit: Women’s Retail

In May, we audited the customer experience of ten leading women’s retail brands. The goal is to audit the qualitative experience with a quantitative measurement, going beyond “soft and fluffy” qualities to get to the heart of what makes an ideal customer experience for a specific vertical.

We created two personas, created an account for each persona, and interacted with the brand both online and offline. We looked at 10 different touchpoints across the customer experience. Using a rubric, we objectively graded each one of the touchpoints to create an overall score of 100. The touchpoints we looked at included:

• Web Site:
  1. Email Sign-Up
  2. Web Personalization
  3. Digital Ads
• Email
  1. Email Volume
  2. Email Campaigns
• Off-Site
  1. Retargeting/Abandoned Cart
  2. Purchase Process
  3. Returning Purchase to Store
• Touchpoint Tactics
  1. Account Sign-up
  2. Consistent Messaging
  3. Loyalty
  4. Other Touchpoints

Each brand reviewed is featured in a Touchpoint Summary and graphic with Customer Experience Audit Score, as well as detailed strengths and opportunities-to-improve on individual touchpoint aspects.

Other key findings included:

• Web personalization was a weak point for all brands, with either very little or no discernable personalization on the websites.
• Cross-channel shopping was easy, but ‘knowing’ the customer didn’t keep pace.
• Omnichannel was lacking as only one brand offered a mobile application and used DM to engage the customer.
• Email effectiveness was undermined as most of the brands sent too few or too many emails in a 30-day period.

For more findings and insights about the customer experiences, download the full report.