Luxury Retail and Digital Management, 2nd Edition

Chapter 14Managing Store Personnel: A Toolbox

I've tried to create a completely new way of organising my sales outlets.

–Tory Burch

In the luxury industry, which is based on creation, customers usually find themselves taking second place. The culture of customer experience has not been a key factor in this industry. In a sense, retailing is a newly acquired skill. The creative process, the product, the store concept and visual merchandising have always been more important than the sales experience itself.

As we have seen in the previous chapters, the new challenge luxury brands face is to increase customer loyalty, and this can only be done at the store level, by improving services and customer relationships. In other words, luxury brands have to become luxury service companies. Three objectives are crucial here:

• The development of clienteling: Each client should be recognised as such and all his or her personal information treasured. Clienteling means establishing a personal relationship between a vendor and a client. This can only be achieved through a specific behavioural approach and with the help of technology (CRM).
• Making service the cornerstone of client relationships: Shopping by appointment, availability of a particular vendor, delivery of purchases, sending hand-written thank-you notes, these are just a few examples of services a client can and should obtain in a luxury store. Luxury brands should strive to identify customer experiences – and consider their stores ...