[Music] Hello everyone, I'm Brian Ameral and welcome to the Clientelling Podcast. In each episode, we'll be talking to the retail industry's most knowledgeable and successful executives, those luminaries that are creating value with the intersection of retail and technology. In every episode, you'll hear about new, innovative and transformational customer-centered ideas that are redefining shopping and creating high-value customer experiences. If you haven't already done so, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and let your friends know by liking us on social media. So, let's get on with the show. [Music] Well, hello again, and we're going to have a very exciting show today. Today, we have Zernita Stefanova, who is the CEO of BSPK, which is a top clientelling and customer engagement SaaS platform, that does business with global retail brands. Zernita is a serial entrepreneur as well as a board member, advisor, and business mentor to Silicon Valley startups. She was an early employee at Wired, I think we all remember that, that I think was acquired by Condon Ast, at E-groups, which was a Yahoo acquisition, as well as a six apart, which was part of St Media, I mean, which was a Myspace acquisition, Prosper and other Silicon Valley technology innovators. Now, during her illustrious career, she has led product strategy and business development with a focus on consumer apps, as well as B2B services. She's been a guest speaker on multiple technology events, as well as the entrepreneurship track at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Zernita was born and raised in Bulgaria, and she defected prior to the fall of the Iron Curtain, who was granted political assignment in the United States, where she became a citizen. She graduated from Stanford, with a BA in international relations in the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania with an MBA in finance. Her passion is the quest for better customer experiences, powered by technology, innovation, and discovery of better and easier ways to communicate, create, and enjoy life, and learning in the mobile age. Well, hello, Zernita. It is great to have you on the show. Thanks for making some time for me and my listeners. Hi, Brian. It's a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. Well, we can do this. So I'm happy to say, you know, you now have gotten to know each other a little bit over the last couple of years. We've certainly had some great conversations. You've really had quite an interesting background. And today, you know, as a CEO of BSPK, this client telling a customer engagement platform, you've been working with some of the world's really, you know, upper echelon luxury retailers in Europe and some here in North America. And you have this really interesting background of having been in the Silicon Valley area. Obviously, you've got, you know, an extraordinary educational pedigree. Let's, you know, what I'd like to understand a little bit here is, you know, tell us a little bit more about your story. And by the way, before I even go into that, I did want to mention that, you know, some of the customers that you're working with really are great companies like, I think you've got Bumplwa, Miss Ahara, Joseph DuCloh, and several others that we were talking about. I think Jay and Weston. So how did you go from kind of the background that we just described to kind of where you are today? Maybe you can walk us through that. Yeah, with pleasure. Of course, you know, my, my, you know, my journey to BSPK and why started BSPK was inspired by great shopping experience. And, and just to, you know, tell the story briefly, I was on a business trip and I walked into a luxury boutique in Las Vegas. It was not even shopping. I just had a little bit of time before my flight back to San Francisco and had an excellent shopping experience. I met an associate and he really sort of engaged me and, and caught my attention. I fell in love with the dress. I wasn't ready to buy. It was a very expensive runway piece and, and I ended up not buying. I left the store saying, I'm sorry, I need to think about this. I have to think about it. So I got back on the plane, came back to San Francisco and, and the next morning I got a very nice text message with the picture of me trying on the dress and very kind words of like, hey, I'm saving it for you. No pressure, but if you change your mind, it's here for you. And of course, I changed my mind about the dress and became a customer of that sales advisor. I thought to myself, wow, why is that such a rare experience? It was delightful, it was memorable, it was fun. And it really sort of made me think, why doesn't everybody do this? Because now I'm a loyal customer. And I went back to the store and I met a store manager and I spoke with sales advisors and asked him about how they do their jobs and what they have. And it was quite shocking how little there was for them to work with. I mean, pen and paper. And as the store manager said, we print out a sales force list every morning and I go and highlight names of clients we have to contact. But you know, the average salesperson, they can think and keeping their head like, you know, doesn't customers. And so it kind of became this very futile exercise of trying to build loyalty. And at the same time, we have the flip side of the customer where all of us want a great experience and want to be recognized and want something special in the moments that matter. And so that was the inspiration, that experience. And as a product strategy, as you know, you talked about my background. I mean, I've done music, I've done communication groups, publishing, FinTech. In every instance, the most successful technology was a technology that was so good that it was invisible. It really sort of made the experience so awesome that people got into the experience without thinking about how it's empowered. And I thought that in retail, that's what was lacking. Even to this day is lacking because the tools that sales advisors have, the opportunities that brands have for technology transformation are really far, far behind the ease of use. And intuitive interface, intuitive experiences that not only customers, but also salespeople want. And why is that important? It's important because the customer has changed. Our expectations have changed. You know, everybody started the megaphone marketing, the big campaigns of the flashy, everything because it's so transactional. And instead, where we engage is where you get a human touch and attention. Humanizing, right? Yeah, and recognition. So that's how BSBK started. And that's how we, you know, how we have been successful. Well, that is, you know, kind of at the core of good clientelling, good outreach, good follow-up particular item holds and things like that. The conversion rates on that, of course, are through the roof. And, and it's through the roof because the customers really do sometimes need to consider what they're going to do. But if you reach back out to them, if you're in constant communication, you become sort of that almost like that best friend that prompts them along in order to to take a certain creating demand and creating that next thing. So I think, you know, you starting there with this, obviously you understand this very deeply today and you've worked with a lot of retailers that have identified all of those practices that really make a difference. You know, we talk a little bit about, you know, what you're hearing from customers. You know, most of our listeners, good portion of our listeners, anyhow, are retailers. And we, you know, we try to give them a broader perspective on what's happening in the market because, of course, any retailers really only seeing the world through their particular lens. So maybe you can share a little bit about what you're hearing from all those retailers that you're out there talking with. Yeah, of course retailers know that they need to change everyone recognizes and is aware of the need to change because the customer has changed. The customer expectations are different. We have a generation that is tech savvy multiple generations that are tech savvy that are used to Instagram their iPhones, TikTok, YouTube, Google. I mean, everything everything is at your fingertips and it's getting easier and easier. And then, of course, we have e-commerce and e-commerce is an incredible convenience, but e-commerce is this or intermediating. It's kind of breaking that human touch, the connection, the loyalty, you know, it's hard for brands to stand out and differentiate. And so it's really kind of challenging for a retailer who used to have a very loyal customer to maintain that. I mean conversion conversion and loyalty, you know, they vary depending on the sector and the very by brand. But the part that is pretty consistent across the board is the retention of that first time customer. It's about 2%. Imagine all these gigantic budgets.
that are being invested in marketing and automation, all that kind of stuff. And at the end of the day, 2% or less of your customers are coming back and becoming a loyal customer. And so there's definitely a recognition that change needs to happen. However, what is difficult for retail, especially less tech savvy, more legacy brands, those brands used to be very strong in the area of loyalty, is that how do you drive retail transformation with the adoption rate that you need by your sales advisors? How do you handle the change management? How do you use your data? Digitally native brands are very good at this. They have lots and lots of data. They come from a technical background very often or founded by people with technical backgrounds. So they have this very deep understanding of how to collect data, how to transform data and what to do with it. For the retail brand, the direction is in the opposite. You have to start from like your store network and figure out how to connect the dots on the entire client journey and the omnichannel experience from the website to your store, back to the website, to your sales advisor, from the sales advisor to the website and really bring, because from the client point of view, it doesn't matter where you shop. As a customer of a brand, you don't care what that thing is called. If it's called omnichannel or something else, you just want a great experience everywhere. You don't think about it. From the point of view, the technology adoption is very difficult. The change management is difficult. Knowing how to connect the dots on the data side is difficult. So yeah, that is kind of where we hear brands experience challenges. You brought up kind of a topic there that when I speak with retailers, I try to think about, let's get them thinking about stores for that walls. Consumers no longer think about the channels, the way the retailer thinks about the channels. So how do you create these omnichannel, these kind of seamless experiences? And certainly the kinds of tools that you're doing at BSPK makes that possible. So where do you think the, obviously the in-store part of that, the in-store experience is changing. How are you seeing that it's different that a few years ago, and where do you think it's going? Just a real quick response on that would be great. Yeah, behaviors that retailers are trying to support in stores, certainly clientelling, that need to engage the customer in a more human way. There's a lot of talk about mobile checkout, which means that you don't have the cashiers register and the salesperson can help you anywhere in the store. That mobility is important. Having service desks with the idea that it's kind of like, I think it was inspired by Apple's Genius Bar where you can go like, get extra service. And then there's a lot of investment, especially in the luxury sector, in nicer stores. The temple store where you walk from. I love being here. The experience is just walking through the front door sometimes, right? Yeah, and I think that's not just in luxury anymore, by the way, that is certainly being adopted and tricking down to the rest of the entire pyramid of, from affordable and aspirational all the way to luxury. Well, if you're going to put somebody, you're going to go through the trouble of going into a store, you've got to give them something that they can't just click on online, right? You're going to give them some kind of experience, something that's memorable, some kind of information, something that's different. And I think it's why that's all happening. Okay, let's talk a little bit about measurement and about how you think about measurement. There's this old adage, you can't measure, I mean, pardon me, you can't manage what you can't measure, right? I just want to know a little bit about how do you think about performance and metrics with the organizations you're working with? Are you translating those online metrics into the Omni Channel world, the in store part of that, and maybe just kind of walk us through some of the key metrics. Your solution is currently tracking for clients. And what are the implications you've seen of having access to all this information and empowering sales associates to do these proactive outreach and engagement, sorts of behaviors? Yeah, with VSPK, we bring that transparency and access to data that a traditionally e-commerce brand would have, we bring that into the store because all of a sudden you have the sales force, the people in the store really getting to know the customer and VSPK is an incredibly easy to use tool. I mean, there's no training required. So now all that data is being very easily captured in the customer interactions, in the service to the client. And so, you know, with VSPK, we help sort of that enrichment of the customer data because most brands, you know, they have a name and maybe an email and maybe a phone number. We VSPK, all this wealth of data in terms of the outreach to connection, what brother customer back, what pictures were engaged with them, et cetera, et cetera. All of that data is now available and gives a much better understanding of the client journey. And so the measurement is really built around that. For the customers, they're being engaged with the first and foremost important metric is adoption because without adoption, any technology is not particularly useful. And that's where, by the way, you know, as a company, as a solution, VSPK truly shines. You know, with the brands and work, we're deployed everywhere in every store, VSPK is being used daily. And we hear from our customers saying to us, our associates cannot work without VSPK anymore. It's an essential, absolutely critical tool for them to their daily job. So adoption is the first measure we put in place. Then we're going to repeat usage and that's where daily usage, daily engagement, time spent, working with the client, helping the client, engaging the client through VSPK comes next conversion. Conversion rates was truly unique. Now with client telling is that conversion rates, you know, used to be that in retail, you have a very high conversion rate with a very tiny sleeper of your client base, the VIPs, right? That doesn't cause clients that any associate can keep in their head. With VSPK now, it's possible to scale that to, you know, the average salesperson, not even average, but you know, every salesperson being able to work with several hundred clients and give them that human touch and customization and tailoring. And of course, those several hundred clients, then go to tell their other buddies, they'll be also really engaging with a lot more people. That network effect, right? For the network effect, the reputation, the loyalty. And then of course, we come back to, okay, how many of those customers who were first time buyers that I mentioned spoke about early in the interview are now on step two and three and four of the journey and now they're moving to that category, cherish category of a loyal customer. And that's where, you know, we see incredible results because for some of our brands, share of transactions are really, you know, conducted after the client has been engaged to VSPK are really through the roof and I can't speak about specific numbers because they're the confidential, but it's really powerful. That's how we measure success. Every touch point, every metric that's important for the business. It's interesting. I know you can't share specific customers and I won't share specific ones, but I will share some specific numbers that I've seen around organizations that really make clientelling an important part of their training and important part of how their associates engage customers. And using a control group, I saw one major department store retailer to get between 350 and 400% larger spend out of the group that they were kind of driving these proactive behaviors. So it's been proven time and time and time again. You know, the other thing it's interesting is that you could look at the behaviors of kind of your average client and then try to figure out, okay, if this is how my best clients work, how many of those kind of be clients, be customers, can I get to start looking like my A customers? And it doesn't take very many of those converting to make a huge difference, you know, to top line revenue, which ultimately, you know, means this is a margin contribution that becomes very, very significant in the whole metrics of the business change. So, you know, it's, I'm sure the people that you're working with, you know, are seeing some great performance in terms of how their organization is shifting with the customers, not only their best customers, but that next tier down of customers that really are able to spend at a higher level when they get that personal service and it drives them. My next question,
is really around, I mean, obviously we're talking a little bit about transformation inside these businesses. Organizations tend to resist, or people inside the organization tend to resist, kind of maintaining a status quo. And you were saying that adoption is a really strong aspect of what the value proposition is at BSPK is able to do. But maybe you could talk to us a little bit about where you do see friction and what is it about what you're doing that is making it easier to get brought adoption? Because in many cases, we have historically seen that being across all different vendors and all different retailers, we've seen the adoption always being kind of a resistance point that has to be overcome. So how do you think about that and what is it that you're doing that makes that different? Well, e-subuse is the path to easier path to adoption. You know, if you have a technology, if you have a solution that's easy to use, it will be adopted. And being able to do that well is the hard part. And that's why a lot of the times when solutions are not adopted, especially in-house build solutions, I mean, I can't say how many times we've run into a brand that's spent millions of dollars on like three, four years building something and then nobody's using it. That's a hard part. Absolutely. And so many times. Exactly. Exactly. And as a company, that's our secret sauce that we come from a background of having seen that for a very long time. And specifically, when I think I am very focused on maintaining and enhancing and improving the ease of e-subuse. As I know, from my experience in music streaming, in groups, in publishing, in Fintech, unless you have a solution that is so easy to do the technology kind of becomes, you know, just its technology, but it's not in your way. It's an enabler compared to an obstacle. It won't get adopted. And so that is the basic, extremely strong focus of what we've done. And that's how B.S.P.I.K.I adopted because every time I go and speak to a sales advisor and give a demo, like, "Oh my God. I would love to have this," right? And so our biggest champions in these organizations are the salespeople who come, go back to their manager and say, "You have to see this." And that's how we have been successful. So e-subuse, very, very important for organizational change. And you're absolutely right. That transformation step, change management, it's a hard one. But if you add on top of the traditional challenges around change management, you know, training yourselves for, is educating, you know, sharing your change. A lot of dream and managing, yeah, all that. If you add technology to that, that becomes very difficult. And so with B.S.P.I.K.I.K.I.K.I.K.I.K.I, it's actually the opposite because we take the technology, the picture we provide something that's super easy. And so for the retailers, then possible to say, "Oh, my God, you're now empowered." Well, guess what? When you empower yourselves, people, they're motivated because they're no longer kind of a proxy, you know, a human check out cash register. They-- there's meaning to their job. They get to know the customer. They're tasked with getting to know the customer. They-- there's greater ownership of the outcome of your effort, right? And so it drives-- You're empowering them. You're empowering them in derives motivation and in derives success. So it's kind of become this very positive, self-reinforcing cycle where all of a sudden-- and this is one thing that we've heard repeatedly from our customers, like, "Wow, we are so surprised how ourselves forcing Gage with B.S.P.K.I." And that's really, you know, has been-- has been a driver for us to be able to pursue vision and server customers in the ways in which they're also successful. Okay, that's great. You know, you actually covered the next question I was going to ask you. So I'm going to move on to something else because you really kind of gave me some great insights there. The-- that-- when I guess I want to talk a little bit about is, you know, my personal experience having worked with retailers, both large and small for decades now, you know, is it smaller store formats and luxury brands tend to be more adept at creating that deep clientelling kind of customer intimacy. Now, that's starting to shift and the large organizations are trying to get there. But I just thought maybe you could share just a minute or so around, you know, what's the biggest difference between the kinds of companies that you've worked with in terms of how they thought about the customer, and how they thought about what was possible inside of their organization given the way they manage their people, the way that they think about their teams, about the way that they're able to do and let's even maintain, you know, kind of a change management process in their organization. Maybe you can just share a little bit about the kind of the customer culture is in how they look at things like clientelling differently across different types of organizational formats. Yeah, the most important, you know, kind of cultural differences that the brands that get clientelling to understand have a very deep cultural understanding of how important the client relationship is. And what I mean by that is, you know, when you go and shop for something that's important to you, that's an experience, that's a one time thing. It's kind of a great thing that comes into your daily life as a surprise. Your relationship with the brand and the salesperson and the product is very different from the relationship you might have with something that is just a need. And so when you think about clientelling, it's kind of that distinction between from a client point of view, you know, what you need versus what you want. The brands that are, you know, appreciate the value of the relationship are more into category of selling products and services that I would describe as things you want. Right. You know, if you if you if you're shopping for for days, you know, that supplies you go on Amazon is designed for you to be done as fast as possible. Find what you need. Click the one one, you know, checkout button and you're done. No discovery, right? I don't want to be doing discovery. I know what I want. Yeah. That point make it as simple as possible. Exactly. There's no need for a relationship. You don't want a relationship. You just want to be done. You want to be inefficient. Whereas in the if for the things we want is the exact opposite. You want to spend time researching your bike, you know, you skip equipment, your travel, you know, plans, your next dress for this party you're going to you, you how you hear whatever it is, right. Everybody has different things they're shopping for. But, but you know, you may be shopping for a like a camera. You might spend like three months researching your like a camera, right. And so all of that makes a very big difference. And the knowledge and experience of the sellers first and the way the brand speaks with you the way it recognizes you is super important and smaller sort of more. More brands focused on that kind of experience, the understanding forms of their relationships. That's that I would describe that as the first most important cultural difference difference in that. You know, it's been interesting to me over the years is having spoken to clientelling across a lot of different types of brands and then people will say, well, you take a big box. And, you know, think of something like a home Depot or a lows and they say, well, you know, would clientelling ever work in that environment, even in those self service high volume transactional kinds of environments. There are ways that these this kind of technology can be leveraged right in the kitchen design and bathroom design center where it is a considered sale and somebody's coming in there really researching and they're looking at different options and it can be used in that environment in order to to kind of stay on top of the project, manage the process with the customer, kind of create that additional demand that's required as they go through maybe a two to five six month process of making determination if they're going to start this project. Same thing as a contractor desk in that environment. And it's always interesting to me that, you know, we use this word retail and shopping as if that is, you know, descriptive in some way. It really isn't every, you know, there are so many different modalities, I guess you could say of terms of what shopings, how do you compare shopping and a grocery store is shopping in a luxury department store, you know, as the same thing, they're completely different experiences in the way that we engage with the product, the way we engage with sales people, the way we think about these things. Is transactional versus creating a discovery and demand kind of a cycle. So culture, you know, it really is I think important for every organization to start to think about who are we, who are customers, what does that shopping journey look like and then how do we apply the kinds of feature and functionality that we need to in terms of how to empower our sales associates to kind of drive those eventualities with our customers. I would add, I completely agree, you know, without actually make even a stronger statement every business, every business has about 20% driving the 80% of the sales. Right. And so every business has a need to build that loyalty. And even, you know, even the grocery store experience you mentioned, I mean, there are eyes where people spend very little time and they're, you know, the aspiration of the things you want to support. The catering side of it, the catering side of it becomes a higher touch environment. Yeah. And you know, I mean, any of those visits you might spend 90% of the time in a store in front of that aisle.
capturing that imagination of the customer. And I do think, mashing big box stores, they've realized that in this day and age, when everybody can very quickly copy what everybody else is doing, the client relationship is where you get a differentiation or you tell your story about how you're different. And so that's why they're investing these brands, even though we call them big box brands, they're looking to create a special area, bringing us more knowledge of ourselves first and create that more rewarding client experience that's also more personalized. - Yep. Well, I know you and I could talk all day 'cause we've done it before. (laughing) But I thought maybe as we kind of wrap this up, what are kind of the three things that you think retailers should be thinking about today? What advice would you give them? You know, but from an operations, from a marketing perspective, when they consider implementing clientelling and trying to extract value from the data that they have today and where they wanna go, kind of what's their vision going forward. What are the three things you think they should be thinking about? - The three things I would recommend is to think about clientelling as a way to build customer loyalty, indispensable way to engage and really make that customer your friend. And that's how they become a loyal customer. The second thing for sure is abuse. Technology is an enabler and not as an obstacle and it has to be easy to use because that's how it gets adopted. That's how it gets used and that's how it delivers on its promise of returning investment. And then the third thing is that great technology and the way in which it's present in the experience in the store represents your brand, your customer who's thinking, "Are investing for me to enable me to have a better experience." But it's also very important investment for the Salesforce because if the Salesforce needs to feel that my brand is investing in my ability to be successful. And that's how you get motivated Salesforce and that's how you get people to engage and to really drive your business forward. So those are the three things I would recommend clientelling, ease of use is an essential element of any technical solution that you bring into your stores or your brand. And also number three, how that investment represents you to your customers and to your employees. That's great advice there. And at that I think we're gonna wrap up here. But I want, there's a need to, we really, really appreciate you coming on the show today. You've shared some great insights for anybody that wants more information about BSPK. I'll put all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking a little bit of time out of your always busy day to kind of jump on the show here with us. And we look forward to seeing more great things out of you and the company. So congratulations on all the great success you've had today. Looking forward to a very powerful future for BSPK. Thanks. - Thank you. Thank you Brian. - Well, that's today's show. Thank you for listening. If you like what you heard, be sure to subscribe to the podcast and like us on social media. Or drop me a line at
[email protected]. If you'd like to learn more about what we do at Clientricity, visit www.clientricity.net. Until next time, stay well and go do something amazing for your customers. (upbeat music)
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