How an iconic luxury retailer embraced phygital experiences, with Liberty London’s Ian Hunt

If you ball that down, none of those three things are what you would call luxury. You would expect to get those three things at any service interaction, whether it's the top end or tools at bottom. However, what's different with us is if we get any of those three things wrong, we get the phrase which I hate, which is why I expected more of you because your liberty. Welcome back to Conversations with Zendask, where we explore how new trends and technology in customer experience are shaping the way that we connect with customers. Each week we speak to customer experience invaders and experts to hear their thoughts and ideas on the future of CX. I'm your host, Nicole Saunders. In this episode, I'm speaking with Ian Hunt, Director of Customer Services and Procurement for Liberty London, one of London's oldest luxury retailers. Ian and his team look after all aspects of customer care for both Liberty's physical and digital businesses, with teams based both in their iconic London store and via a third-party BPO based in Cape Town, South Africa. Ian and I discuss the technological changes that physical retailers have had to implement over the past several years, how he's thinking about the future, and what other retailers should be thinking about in their digital evolution. Enjoy! Ready to take your customer experiences to the next level? Build lasting relationships, the Zenus Complete Customer Service Solutions so that you can exceed every customer's expectations. Sign up for a free trial at zendask.com. Ian Hunt, welcome to your conversations with Zendask. How are you today? Yeah, very good. Thank you, Nicole. Thanks for inviting me. So tell us a little bit about Liberty London. What is it that your organization does? Nicole Liberty London is a department store in the West End of London. It's been operating for, we're coming up to our 160th anniversary in the next few years. A one-shot, but it's at what they call a great-to-star listed building, quite iconic. Any of your listeners who have most seen the film Curella will be familiar because it featured in the story and it was filmed by Disney at our shop. And this is the department store. We sell all things from fashion and so feature products that were famous for copies of rugs, stationery, flowers, all sorts. Right. And tell us a little bit about your role. What do you do there? And what is your day-to-day like? So right, in nine years of Liberty this very week, my full job title is Director of Customer Services Ampricument, which is 35-ish people in customer service and one person who looks after procurement. So predominantly the obvious stuff look after customer that come into the store. Customers that contact us via the telephone, they have email, we also have a third party call centre down in Cape Town in South Africa to look after our online customers. And then the procurement stuff is just as important that knows from our house. So all the famous carry bags, ribbons boxes, all the lovely things that customers like to do from this other than the product that we sell. And Liberty London has been around for a long time, I understand. Yeah, our first shot was over the 1875. How? The building we're in now, we've moved to in 1924, so next year we'll be the centenary. So it's what they call a listed building. So what you're allowed to do to it in terms of the structure of the building is very closely monitored essentially by the government's. So I imagine in all of that time the business has gone through many rounds of evolving how it operates and what it does. But I think most particularly familiar to our audience is the way that a lot of things have changed for retail businesses over the last few years. Of course, COVID forced a lot of businesses to have to shift to online creating digital experience and things like that. I'll listen a little bit about what have been some of the big sort of going from physical to digital evolutions for Liberty. When I first joined the website was a very small part of our business, at least, and maybe 7-8%. And with the advent of the lockdowns and COVID, very quickly went to well, 100% for a period of time because the store was closed. Our settles are around 50-50. We have some very very low customers. We're very lucky in their respect that brand is well and loved. And a lot of tourists. So when we're into lockdown, we still have people from all around the world who still wanted their lip-tifix. So we had to adapt really quickly. And history as a tourist, we did it relatively successfully. It maybe didn't feel like that way with us for three months. As you went through some of that transformation, what were some of the most important things that you found made a really big impact on your customers' experience? What kinds of things really stand out to you if you think back to that period of time? Everybody throughout the world was going through a period of change, running, and getting used to the phrases the new new all everyone was using that phrase when they for the first year. We were reacting at the same time and what's reinventing the wheel, what felt like on a weekly basis. Traditionally, you have to use one shot. So the idea of maintaining a very accurate inventory file hasn't always been front of mind, the liberty because most of our customers are walking, see what goods you have on the display, whereas to operate. And the e-commerce business, that's absolutely paramount. If the system says you've got five or something, you need to have five, not one, not 50. So being able to maintain that was quite a challenge because we weren't set up for it, but trying to put the controls in place for that type of thing at a time when everybody wants to sell, sell, sell, and keep the company afloat was not all those challenges. I imagine so. We spent a lot of this phase of going everything undid at all, like you said, reinventing the wheel every week to try to keep up with how do you keep the business going when there is no physical space. And now a few years later, we're kind of coming back to this place where people are coming back out into the world. Things are back to the old and normal. I guess we can say a little bit more. How does that balance look for you? Are you still finding most people are coming back to the physical space? Has this sort of forever changed your digital business? I think it's forever changed that is your business, but in a very positive way, because there are very few businesses in retail space that start as a website and then become a physical shop. Right. And I'll often theorise with colleagues and friends that if they did, you could probably do things slightly differently. And this is kind of a unique opportunity because effectively in a very short period of time we've done that. We've gone from our library business to a business with a physical presence. Many of the things that we had to change, they're the way we did things, remained where we moved product around the way we were with our internal colleagues to keep contact teams. Zoom, for example, it wasn't really a thing. I'm sure Zoom existed or remember having Zoom calls in people, but then that's long before COVID. But I would never dream of having a Zoom or a team's call with somebody who was in the next office or in the next county or in the next state in the US, which we now do as a matter of course. They're all working from home team. It was never particularly prevalent here in London for retailers. But it's a thing now. It's really made a difference to our colleagues and if it makes a difference to our colleagues, it makes a difference to our customers as well. What kind of a difference have you seen that it's made for your colleagues? It would appear that stuff attention seems to be a good thing. Our office is next to the shop, it's in one heart of London. So we're very lucky in London. The public transport is very good. However, it's not particularly cheap. So if somebody chooses not to travel in every day, that can make a significant difference to their life. They will get life balance. This phone proves. So if there's certain roles, the requirement to be in the office every day is not on good day. I think many ways requirement to be in London every day is not on good day. So we can support people in the right way. I would never have dreamt of another call centre in South Africa prior to this. Right. Quite literally is the other side of the world, but there's been say, maybe is they're pretty much in the same time zone as us and it works really, really well. So it's crazy how things have changed so unexpectedly over the last few years. Yeah. How do you think that customer expectations have changed? What are your customers at large telling you that's different than it was maybe five, six, ten years ago? In many ways, it hasn't changed for a living time because the customers that we experienced when the web was very small, their expectation was they were buying from a brand. So they would expect the same level of luxury, personalised service that you get if you come to our store. So then when we moved to selling online, the expectation was there and initially we weren't able to deliver that because it was so very small, though we didn't have the infrastructure to do that. When sales went crazy, we had to because we had no choice and the lessons that we've learned that hopefully everyone's going to stick around for years to come. It's always been a goal online that we deliver the same luxury service that you get. So when you come into Liberty, it's very honest, being it's very quirky, we're quite different, the staff are the same and we absolutely pride ourselves in that. Trying to extend that into a digital world is a little bit more difficult because you don't have the interaction you can't tell from like I face the face conversation, I'm not aware of it. I'm talking to somebody, smiling back at me, I'm talking to somebody who's not interested in what I've got to say. You don't know that where they're in the store, staff are very good at picking up on that, they'll comment on the weather, how people are looking, what they're wearing, what they're doing with the rest of their day, they do all those things, they do quite naturally. He's not forced in any way, they're just received to attract as types of people. So you're missing all those social cues and you're engaging with the customer? Absolutely. Yeah, it's absolutely impossible to do that. So how have you gone about thinking about creating those personalized experiences? What are some of the things you've been able to implement to do that online? For my team, my customer service team, the way we've recruited, it's just probably more luck than strategy, but I'll take the common word and it was going to give it to me is where we're based right in the heart London. The sorts of people who were looking for work as the world started to start with people who are working in the theatres and the pubs and clubs. So we have a group of individuals who are dancing, seeing and perform because that's what they were trained to do and every natural at it. And then what we've done is we've empowered them without help the customer. You deliver these missing, how to help the customer who's watching for tea, how to help the customer who wants to buy a coffee. The other bit is quite natural to them. Whereas in previous companies, we chose to be the other way around, you employ people who are customer service professionals, remind them. Remember to smile, remember to use the customers and we deliver to use completely the other way around. Sounds like a fun company culture. Well, we like it that way. I'm really pleased when I hear people say they have fun when they come to work. We have serious stuff to do as well, but if we can make it fun and we try to, then I know I've done much job right. If people go home with this one, as well as come in with this one with me, they say, "Well, I'll think I'm doing okay." So what are some of the technologies that you implemented in order to start serving your customers online? Obviously, there's, as you said, images online, enabling people to order. Are there other things that you've done, maybe from a customer service perspective? A couple of big things, so we have an online deployment software that we implemented during lockdown, which helped with virtual appointments. So when the store was closed, we still had people working in the store as we were picking web orders, but we could make a virtual deployment for a starting session, for a makeup session. The sorts of things that people would travel to us to do, and we maintain that to a certain extent, with the help of the video guys at Xenders, we've added WhatsApp, so our contact types, which is being hugely popular, somewhere in the region of 25% of their contacts and that comes through WhatsApp. So our customers using that to troubleshoot issues or asking questions about purchases they're making or just the whole gambit? The whole lot. Yeah, the whole lot. But initially, when we first added it, it was at a busy time for us where we're out of service level, back to customers, was not where I'd like it to be. So people would use WhatsApp, and it made you a few hours before we get back to them. But thankfully we're in a really good place now. We've got the staff in right, and the contact level is right, and things have started to smooth out. So we're answering queries at the moment within an hour, which means we can't start helping with customers who are having trouble checking out. One of the little bit of help making that final decision is this the right product for me. We can add that personal interaction. We can answer questions that possibly aren't there on the webpage or are, but aren't written in a way that that customer understands. I love the way that you speak about personalization, because I think a lot of the time when we talk about this in our industry, we're talking about how can you maybe use a bot to serve the information about a specific product, the specific customer uses, and you're really speaking about it in terms of like, how can I engage the user or the customer really in making sure that we've got the right product for them and having a very human interaction with all of that. As you see more of these AI and automated technologies coming online, how do you think about maintaining that balance of that very personal human touch with some of these technologies that could potentially increase efficiencies and other things like that? The word there is efficiency is about. If somebody wants to speak to one of my team, then they should speak to one of my team, then that's it. There are many customers you don't. Whereas in days gone by, they had to because that's the only channel we had, emails and stuff. So I think what the technology is going to do, and this was really exciting, is it helps us understand very quickly, does this customer want to treat such a human or not? And if they do, great, I've got loads of great humans who want to talk to you as well, they're very good at it. If you just want to answer, where's my order? Are you open this weekend? Do you take American Express? All that kind of functional stuff. I don't want those customers to have to wait in line a bit like somebody who wants to chat about a fat brick, but they're grandmother bought from this in the 1930s. Right. Those things are valid, but why should somebody stand in line behind somebody else? So that's what's exciting for me. Something that has come up in several of the conversations I've had recently is really about the impact that AI will have, not just for the customers, but for the people that are helping them. And just along the lines of what you were just saying, it's all about how can we empower a customer service representative with more information about the user or moving a little bit more quickly or getting some suggested responses, but you can still have that human conversation, but in a more effective, more informed, more efficient way. Nothing made me smile more when I see a CSAT comment from a customer that says, "What I love about you Liberty is you take the time to read my emails and somebody gave me a personal response." And then when you look at the response, you can see that that was a macro. And it was two clicks. So if they're more of a warm regards kind of person versus a person, you're sincerely kind of person, then they're encouraged to do that. They can say, "I'll be honest and choose to. We trust them to make that a judgment called based on the integration we custom." They don't always get it right, but you don't always get it right when you talk to them in face to face either. It sounds like a lot of this has been really positive for you. What were some of the biggest challenges as you moved to more digital service for your customers? We're communicating what goes on in store. It's not easy. We mentioned rather top that we're coming close to 150 years old and sometimes it feels like some of the processes and some of the systems are equally 150 years old and connecting all the dots on transcript would be quite difficult from a technology point of view. And the customer service team, my team, I would say this clearly unbiased, but they have a glue that holds it together. So they're the ones that will understand what a customer is asking if they have sort of go around the houses and knowing where to go and get that information and translating into an answer that helps the customer. So that's the biggest challenge is the fact that not all of that parts of their company, from a technology point of view, talk to each other what the way you'd want them to. And I'm sure we're not allowing them in that respect, we're sure we actually companies got stolen without real estate. One of the things that we've been hearing a lot, particularly in the retail space, is how much customers are looking for really seamless experience. They maybe want to go start looking for products online, have an interaction at chat by, but then maybe go to the store to complete the transaction or something like that. How are you thinking about bridging that digital and physical world and trying to make that as seamless and experience as possible? You'd be surprised very company that only has one shock or one website, how difficult that's been in the past. Yeah. Fairly recently we've had a change in managerial structure, so there is four under the same director now always helps. She's got a customer, absolutely, of what she does, which is real. The team working together, to be honest, you can have the best technology in the world, but even though it's not a tool to each other, it's not going to work. So we've got a really strong customer service team based in the store that integrate themselves with the store team. So we talk about what's right for customers rather than what's right for a web customer and a store customer. And that's in Bruce Tenthold. What do you think has made the biggest difference? What made that improvement? The people actually, when we first went into that first three weeks is what it was advertised as was and then the three weeks and I think maybe seven months. Many of my colleagues who work in the shop, the shop is closed, they actually did not have any jobs so we had to find something else to do. They came and helped with web picking. They came and helped with customer service. In fact, my customer service manager used to work in the shop and lock down for an end to that and she's now my team. I'll never give her back that experience help because people got to see how things operate on the other side and realize that they weren't the end of me. They were just doing things differently, the same set of customers at heart. And for me, that's the best thing that could have happened because you can force those things fine. You say, "What do you come and do us a compliment with us for two weeks and you'll learn the ropes and we'll come and work with you?" And I've worked places where we've done that and those things are great, those programs. But this was very much what you're doing this now and you're doing this for a foreseeable future. And in many cases, people haven't gone back or they've gone back and they're so much better what they did before because they understand now. That's a huge positive for me. Sounds like people who had to build some new skill sets but ultimately things that make us stronger and better at service across the board. I hope so and they're saying where he's volunteering because no one has said they didn't enjoy it. We've been seeing retailers experimenting a lot in new territory. Things like fashion shows, in Roblox or digital native brands bringing their stuff to physical with pop-up shops. What does all of this kind of innovation experimentation mean for you and how are you thinking about things that you might be pursuing in the future? I'm not sure we're ready for Roblox to serve. I'd joke with somebody recently that Liberty is Dragon S000 to a 20th century and they corrected me. I thought I meant 21st century and I said, "Let's go one step at a time." I'm not sure to be honest with you then. I mean, well, we got to think we're pretty huge. On Instagram, we've got the bus on me and followers recently which is quite a nice milestone. Congratulations. We have a huge following there. Some of the things you did a lot there and we have a very big Fabrics business with Fabrics for our Liberty Fabrics. So we created the Liberty Crafting Club so there's a power army of people out there. making things and quilting and face masks and scrubs for the healthcare work is true. Lots of that. So we engaged very much for the community spirit in that way. I'm not sure there's too many technological world stress in there. Thinking about sort of marketing promotional strategies, what recommendations would you have for other retailers that are finding that they need to move more into the digital space or they're trying to figure out how to handle an increasing volume of customer service requests? What would you tell them? How should they think about it? How should they approach solving that problem? While other things that I learned quite early in my customer service journey with other tenants, coming into what is D to be a luxury retailer, those luxury products, I kept in told you need to deliver a luxury service as what customers expect. And then through the customer service and surveys that we send down the back of those endostockies, we realized quite quickly that customers are really only interested in three things, which is we fast, we're you friendly and we're you factual. I've engineered it today, we're in with their feet and from teller, but the compilers we get that we answer them we also really quickly we did it with a small interface and we answer the question that was being asked at us. And if you boil that down, number of those three things are what you would call luxury. You would expect to get those three things at any service interaction, whether it's top end or tools about them. However, what's different with us is if we get any of those three things wrong, we get the phrase which I hate, which is but I expected more of you because your liberty. Well, I was sort of obsessed with what you think people's perception of your brand is, you get the basics right. So answer that question. Well, if they ask more of the low question, ask all of them, look just the one that's easy, do it in a friendly way and do as quickly as you can. And then the other bit almost doesn't matter because their recollection will be with these questions, what they sit at with one at the end. I asked to help they gave it and it wasn't difficult. So taking away the barriers from the team to make that easy and that customer's realized that being listened to, which sounds really easy for me to say, he's taken probably five years to get it. So it's easy to say it, what's we got at any end. But it's a good reminder that you don't have to start with the most elaborate, complicated thing, what you really need to start with is getting the basics right. That's my courage. So the foundations is the first thing you build and build a house right now. Well, thank you so much for the conversation today. This has been really lovely speaking with you and learning about this. And I'm sure lots of folks out in the retail industry will be very interested to hear what you have to say. Thank you very, very kind of each one. So many industries have undergone a lot of change in the past few years. But retail in particular seems like it's had to really shift dramatically in terms of taking the physical retail experience into a digital space. It sounds like Liberty London has done that very successfully and it was fascinating hearing from Ian how they've gone about that transformation. On our next episode of Conversations with Zendesk, we'll hear from Michael Pace, VP of Global Member Services at Virgin Pulse. You'll want to tune in for this one. He has some great insights on how they've leveled up their self-service customer support and achieved some huge cost savings while improving the customer satisfaction. He's also going to talk about the employee experience at Virgin Pulse. What makes its culture so great and why focusing on the employee experience is the key to a great customer experience. So be sure to tune in. Please like and subscribe and share our podcast with a colleague or a friend. You can always find us in the Zendesk community. Visit us at usergroups.zendesk.com for opportunities to connect with other Zendesk users in the customer support and experience space. Until next time, I'm Nicole Saunders for Zendesk, the intelligent heart of customer experience. Ready to explore how AI can help your business provide richer customer experiences? 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