Luxury Retail and Digital Management, 2nd Edition

Chapter 11Customer Experience and Building Loyalty

When people enter a Louis Vuitton store, they should find the best level of service in the world.

–Bernard Arnault¹

Offering unparalleled service and personalising relationships with every customer is the main challenge facing luxury brands today. How does one achieve it?

We recommend subdividing it into six important steps:

• Focusing on the customer, by placing the customer at the centre.
• Turning regular customers into brand advocates.
• Offering a unique experience – and delivering it.
• Defining the contract between the brand and the customers and adopting specific tools for the optimisation of the business (customer segmentation, CRM, etc.).
• Defining customer journeys.
• Rethinking the concept of the experience lived by the customer.

The luxury industry is now faced with four major customer concerns, concerns that will shape its future:

• All over the world, luxury customers are looking for more than just a product: they are seeking an experience and a personalisation of the relationship. They are looking for a level of service that is far beyond what luxury brands offer today. Bain's studies on luxury attest to this year after year. In its 2017 report (d'Arpizio 2017), it highlights that luxury is ‘changing skin’, it is becoming ‘millennialised’, all its customers now look for a new relationship with luxury, inspired by the much more informal, driven by the millennial generation (born after 1980). Bain identifies, among others, ...