[Music] Hello everyone, I'm Brian Amaral 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-centric 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, welcome back. We are going to continue on after show one, now we show two, with an interview with John Leibler. John has over 30 years of retail experience, a very broad-based experience in store-operation strategy, logistics, customer experience, store technology, and John started his career on the floor in a retail sales environment and has been a division-device present-store operations for 700 cake jewelers in locations he then went on to transition into operations administration for $6 billion specialty retailer with over 3,500 locations. And he's really touched every aspect of the business at scale, right, responsible for field communications, training, repair, new store openings, corporate policies, and procedures, and the in-store technology. What's nice is that John has really worked both in large and small retailers and implemented client-telling and various sort of customer-centric initiatives. I've had the pleasure of working with John in the past. If you want to know a little bit more about John, we have, go back and listen to the first show and John has spent a fair bit of time walking us through his philosophy around client-telling, give us a lot of narrative around what really constitutes a great client-telling experience. Talked a lot about the whole process of moving from manual, what he was calling a PT book, a client telling the black book, and moving that into a technology platform, that whole process of getting alignment in the organization and getting the right people participating in that, and making sure that they ultimately know it. And then the challenges of a big organization versus a small organization, and how do they adapt, and how do they adopt these kinds of technologies. So John, welcome back. And we have some more questions. We can get to in the first one, and I appreciate you hanging around a little longer with me here so that we can continue talking. Yeah, right. Thank you for having me back. This is my pleasure. Well, you share so many great ideas. I could listen to you all day here. So let's talk a little bit about what I think is the biggest issue that I've seen out there. And it happened to the early stage when you first start talking to the retail executives. It certainly is the difference between success and failure, and that is adoption. Right? So where do you see the biggest challenges of adoption? And in some of the projects you did, you know, what did you do about it? What advice would you give other retailers that are kind of looking to implement a customer-centric solution like client-telling? Sure. Yeah, Brian, I think that is really the most important question. Right? Nobody wants to spend substantial sum of money on technology and then have no one use it. We definitely had some successes, and I've definitely had some some misses. So I will tell you the three things that I've seen that most impacted specifically as it related to client-telling, but I think this goes for most store-facing technology implementation. Was number one, we ran into a situation where most 10-year sales people were resisted. You know, they've been doing it for a long time. 15, 20 years, it's worked for me, right? And typically, your tenure drill is also very, very successful. So why would I want to change that, which I'm doing? And so to solve for that, to a certain degree, it became in the pre-implementation phase where I've talked about it length in the previous podcast about making sure the end user is part of the conversation. So you create those evangelists and more than that, you're building something that they like. So it becomes when they get the new system, like, oh, this makes sense to me. But there also has to be a post process. So one of the things that we instituted was number one, post interviews. And so we would reach out to our most 10-year sales people and all the way through and even post-implementation and get their feedback as what was going well, what was not going well. Number two, we had a lot of around table discussion. So we would bring people in and we would wipe board out again. And what was going well, not going well. And these were people at all levels of the organization. And then we were willing to make changes. And so I don't, we built this sort of agile light, wasn't pure agile, right? We didn't do scrubs and whatnot. But we did build it in sprens. So we had the MVP, but then what we were able to do is we built these all out in two weeks' sprens. So we were able to move things around. And so as we got the feedback, we were able to then change on the fly to a certain degree what the next rollout looked like or change what we had already implemented. Because that was number one. >> Yep. One of the things I wanted to mention here is, unlike a lot of retailers, the particular retailer that you were working with at the time really made a decision to go ahead and build a platform. Because they really needed to start, really rebuild everything in their enterprise. The underlying customer data architecture really wasn't there. And so they made a decision to kind of start there and build this complete front of store enterprise-wide platform. But it's interesting the way that you went through that agile approach in order to really identify what are the core values that we need to be driving. And then what are the core behaviors that we need to make sure that we're managing towards and that we're able to monitor. And then how do we build the future and functionality around that to make sure it's supporting. Thought you guys did a really good job in kind of moving through that process. >> Well, and I appreciate that. And we've taken that to other retailers who did not do an internal build, right? Who bought something sort of, quote, off the shelf. But we didn't turn on all this technology, all the functionality at one time. It wasn't a big bang. It was, you know, let's get some of the core functionality out there, right? And then once that got baked in, then you can turn on things as you go. And so that what happens then is you're really building a foundation of core behaviors. And then you build on those behaviors. A lot of times what I've seen is you just launched all out there and people got lost in so many options. And so I do strongly advise that becomes a best practice approach, which leads me to the second piece that was a, can't believe I'll take full ownership of this on my part. I did not fully understand the impact that the technology in someone's hand would have in the selling process. So for instance, you know, one of the core behaviors you have with client telling is you want to capture guest information. Well, when do you capture that? Do you capture the greeting? Do you capture the end of the sale? You have guests who didn't make a purchase, but you want to capture that. Suddenly you have an iPad and somebody's hand and they're trying to type on an iPad. Well, now you're losing the guest connection. So you introduce a client capture card as a customer fill it out. Like all of those real interesting behaviors didn't come to light until after we launched the system. So basically you can then as you launch out future systems with future clients anticipate that. But I do think it's critical to try to anticipate the impact of that technology will have on the day to day selling. Yeah, it does change process. There's no question about it. And it's a matter of trying to keep the best of what works in terms of the human connection. The technology is supportive without it being distraction. Correct. And then the last piece and there's a number of things. But I think this is really critical is making sure you get the data right. Whether, you know, especially with client telling, but with it, I had a bell, John, you wish I had a bell on that. You know, we had a very big challenge. I've had enough seen this now in a couple of client telling rollouts with just duplicate records, right. So how are you making sure that you're deduping effectively? How are you not continuing to create duplicate records, right? So you're creating a record in POS. It's also being subsequently recreated in client telling it becomes two of the same. What is your ongoing deduping process? I mean, this is obviously important for an execution standpoint, but it's really important for credibility standpoint. When you've got a field team that you're saying we want you to use this, there's going to be hesitance to use a new system. If they don't believe in the system, they're going to start naturally looking for reasons why not to use it. And if the data is not right, they're just going to go, nope, and it's really hard to create hype. Get everyone excited, have them jump into the system and have it not work, and then try to get them back into it again because you've lost their credibility. So getting it right the first time I think becomes extremely important. Yeah, it does. And I've seen that, I mean, you know, I've done an awful lot of implementations over the years. And sometimes you have the ability to influence the IT organization more than others to get things cleaned up before you start. And even seeing pilot projects that, you know, lingered for three years because they couldn't get their data right and people would go in and do a search on a customer. And it would show up six different times in there and they wouldn't know which one had the right transaction history. You know, it's all kinds of issues like that. So you have a new issue. Yeah, so it really is. I mean, the credibility of the system, it needs to be, it needs to be virtually perfect. And I know that you guys have a lot of work in and around that. So let's talk a little bit about tracking the effectiveness of client telling once you actually kind of having places. What kind of metrics were you thinking about, or maybe some of the soft benefits that made no overall impact on the company? Right. Before I go, I want to go back to one thing you just said because I think it's really important. Someone once said to me that perfection is the enemy of progress. It's important that what you launch works perfectly. What's not important is that you launch a perfect system. And so I'm agreeing with you, but what I want to make sure people know is that rather long shout minimum functionality that works really, really well as opposed to lots of function.
You have the option to launch out in next releases more functionality, but if only does three things do it really, really well because you won't get people back into the system, right? Yep. That's great advice. Yeah. Great advice. Okay. I appreciate. Yeah. So going back to what you're asking as it relates to tracking effectiveness, this was definitely a labor of love, especially when it comes to clientele because understanding how not only guess capture, but then store outreach, how that's driving effectiveness beyond what would be new merchandise programs, new marketing programs, who's getting credits for that, right? Especially when you're building a CRM, which you can't really test, right? It's a 360 view to the customer for all stores. So could you have turned clientele on and some stores not turned on the other? Yes. So I think it's important for organizations when they are starting to launch the system, trying to understand how they're going to see that and doing the AB test. To be real detailed, the metrics that I found most effective, number one were sales made after outreach. And we put a specific timeline on it. You could choose seven days, 12 days, 14 days, but from all channels, one of the things that I'm hearing quite a bit from clients is stores are getting increasingly frustrated that they meet, work with the guests and then the guest goes and buys it on.com and they don't get credit. Now, whether that credit is through a P&L or it's just secondary recording of the data, on each channel means on each channel, right? So having sort of these market-related P&Ls becomes very important. That's probably for another show. But we definitely said to our teams, look, if you get capture, customer information and you do an outreach and they make a purchase, we're going to gamify that and give you credit so we can at least measure it and see who's doing well, who's not doing well. So that was number one. Yeah, it's great because you're doing attribution. Absolutely. At the end of the day, so much of this activity, we really have to be able to attribute it back to some. Correct. Whether it's a marketing piece and a lot of new technologies out there trying to track the attribution of specific online and social media marketing, what not, does that actually create an in-store experience? But one of the nice things we can do in, I know you did in your client telling solution was to make sure that every outbound communication that came, you were able to have a single view of the customer and then know whether or not that customer responded exactly correctly to the kind of communication that went out and therefore you could apply the attribution directly, which is incredibly powerful. Spot on. The other metric that actually did not measure my initial time doing this but learned over a couple of other implementations of a client-tired product was new guest acquisition. So if you consider just you have a hundred guests that walk in a store and they give them period of time, you have a 10% conversion, so 90% of the people came in and left. That's 90 people that we really are invisible to us. So one of the other metrics we pushed was trying to capture a percentage of those people. Now, that's tricky. You have to give the customer a reason to give you their name that's non-invasive and that becomes very difficult from a selling standpoint. Once you teach that, now what happens is you're capturing this huge group of people that didn't buy something but you're creating a loyalty and an emotional connection and they will come back to you again. If you think in terms of, we just use jewelry again, a gentleman coming in who's looking at me and gauging, he's not going to buy it the first time he walks in a store. But how do I build out such a relationship to where he's going to say to me, "Yeah, let's talk again when I'm more ready." And I can create a reason as his advisor to reach out to him in a non-invasive way just to continue to build that relationship. And that strategy can be implemented across really any retail. Certainly, anybody considered sale, right? I mean, anything that's considered sale, you really want to start in that process as early as possible to understand what that customer is and use it as a right. It's a shared content, shared ideas, invite them to store events. There are so many things that you can do. Before they actually spend dollar one with you. Correct. Just recently, I was at the National Retail, the NRF, and I'm a student of retail. So when I'm bored, I go shop. That's what I do. I love it. And I had this thought in my head that I was going to go into stores and I would buy something and they only had to do, there was only one behavior they had to exhibit and I would make a purchase in that store. So I think I hit 53 stores over the course of a couple of days, Brian. Some of the top stores in New York, like these are the cream of the craft, the flagship stores. I made zero purchases and do you know what my criteria was? I have no idea. What was your criteria? They had to get my name. If somebody simply was able to go and get me to say, yeah, I'm John, I would have made a purchase. And I never saw it. I saw variations on greetings. There were some were perfunctories, some were this, some of that. I had this one gentleman really do a phenomenal job explaining the brand. He gave me his name, his name was Brandon, so shout out to Brandon. But not one person in all of these stores effectively said, what's your name and it took her from there. And if you do any reading on human behavior, getting and using a name is really number one. Absolutely. And so I'm soap boxing a little bit, but this comes back to every customer comes in your store as an opportunity. Client telling helps you capture that, especially these new guests. So that was another criteria and just sort of the add on to that. One of the things that we did is so we did secret shops in a number of organizations that I worked with. Well, what we added, and we didn't do this my initial time, but this was an additive later, was we would, we added a couple of questions to the secret shop, which were do they capture, do they ask me my name, do they capture information, and do they complete a outreach. We would then go back into the client telling system. So we would pull the data from the secret shop with their shoppers names and we would see, did they do an outreach and what did that outreach look like and sound like. And then we created KPIs around that and then behavioral training around that extremely impactful. That's great. No, that's great. So you basically, it's opposed to just trying to go back and survey customers. You actually had very specific tactical people going in to do this. And then you could close in the loop on that and taking those learnings as a way to enhance the program. That's a great way to do it. That's great, John. So what advice would you give other retail operations and marketing execs that are either considering implementing client telling for the first time or perhaps trying to extract the real value from a system that they currently have in place? Yeah, I think that's an amazing question and probably could be one for an entirely other podcast, but to sort of try to summarize it, I think there are three things that are incredibly important. Number one, choosing the right solution, then putting steps in place so you are ensure a successful implementation. And then finally, and you brought it up a number of times, is how do you go and drive user adoption, right? And if you take them sort of one at a time, choosing the right solution, what I was with the publicly traded $6 billion company, we had a very clearly defined RFP process. And we would put vendors through the ringer. I have not seen that process in a number of other engagements. And sometimes people choosing solutions was the first and I was presented to them because they have a buddy who owns the company, make sure you have a clear process. And that needs to have a clearly defined goal, what are the KPIs? And start with the end in mind, right? Exactly, right. What behaviors are trying to drive? What kind of journey are you trying to support, make sure the vendors you are talking to have the capacity to be able to address that fully for you? Exactly. And I don't know if you remember this, Brian, but one of the things I had in my whiteboard in my office was a little algebraic formula that was NT plus OP equals EOP. So I know this is a podcast that people can't see, but basically that stands for new technology plus old process, X-Ols, expensive old process. And I forget who you may have been the one who brought that to my mind, but one of the things that I think is really important and I've seen this in multiple implementations is where people want to bend the technology to fit their antiquated processes. And most technologies exist because they're built on best practices from dozens and dozens of other retailers. They're really willing to change processes because of now you end up with a highly customized solution that is very difficult to manage down the road. So I think that's, that would be number one, okay, as it relates to advice. Ensuring a successful implementation, again, clearly to find those expectations, set realistic timelines. Don't let the business drive the timeline, right? What you don't want to do is continually miss timelines because it's being, they're set on realistically. Consider agile, right? If you do the sprints at any degree, I think it's extremely helpful. And then this is real particular, but ensure the testing environment is real. I went into a number of implementations where the store environment was different than the testing environment and then when they actually went and did rollouts, it didn't work because the Wi-Fi wasn't light in the stores or whatever happens to me. So I think that's a critical element as well. That's great. And the last piece is to ensure, you know, user adoption. And we've talked to a great deal about that, but you've got to have the end user involved in the beginning. You need to employ just basic change management protocols, extensive communication, comprehensive training. I'm going to say training.
not just technical training, it's behavioral training, have clear adoption metrics, and then have reporting and incentives that match those metrics. So you know you're getting what you signed up for. - That's great, and you know you're right, we could do an entire program on that, John, I'm gonna hold you to that, because I wanna come back and talk a lot about how do you actually implement the behavioral change inside the organization to ensure that once, once you've gone ahead and gotten to the point of having a piece of technology, how do you make sure that the organization coalesces around that and really gains the value. And I think that's really a big part of what this podcast is always gonna be about is making sure that people get to that place between the white paper and reality, and they really get the value that they're looking for. John, it has been such a pleasure. I can't tell you how much it appreciate you coming on the show, you think shared some wonderful ideas and thoughts over these two different episodes with our listeners, and I'm gonna bring you back. But thank you very much, John, and a successful 2020 for you. - Thank you, Brian. I appreciate it, and that's everyone listening. Remember, it's all about that 101 relationship, so make sure it's a good one. - Thank you, take care. (upbeat music) 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, say well, and go do something amazing for your customers. (upbeat music)
PodcastTranscript AI