Samantha Conyers started her new role as First Retail Group’s CXO in December of last year, in a move many of her friends and colleagues thought was “crazy.”
As the Christmas rush reached its last-minute, bargain-hunting crescendo, Conyers eased herself into her new job by spending the entire month on the shop floor.
Well, on the shop floors – plural. First Retail Group is the largest franchise operator in the Caribbean, with their brands including the likes of Aldo, Levi’s Jeans, Victoria’s Secrets, and many more.
As you can imagine, with such a diverse range of brands, it’s impossible to have one all-encompassing CX strategy. A point that Conyers explains:
“We have such a wide variety of brands that there is literally no day that is the same. When you think about it, Levi's experience, for example, is totally different from that of Victoria's Secret or of Bath & Body Works.”
While Conyers found the opportunity to see firsthand how the customer experience differed from brand to brand helpful, she also admitted that it emphasized to her how challenging it was going to be to “create any level of consistency from an experience perspective.”
But Conyers is clearly someone who enjoys challenges. While the shop floor may seem an odd starting point for most CXOs, it typifies her and the company’s “hands-on” attitude towards brick-and-mortar retail CX.
But how did she go about adapting to her new position and implementing the necessary changes to improve the company’s CX offerings?
Dog Food and Data
Dog food and data might not be two things you’d usually like to see together, but they both play a large part in the company’s CX strategy.
Conyers explains how First Retail Group’s Founder and Managing Director, Omar Hadeed, is a strong advocate for the “eat your own dog food” business philosophy.
Despite the organization having grown from one brand in 2016 to currently encompassing 18 brands and 65 locations across Trinidad and Tobago, Hadeed continues to be a physical presence in the stores:
There's not a day that the team, Omar and Nadine (Head of Operations) do not have contact with the end consumer. He is in our stores every single day, and Nadine is running the day-to-day.
“As you would imagine, that’s getting a lot more difficult. So that's one of the reasons I was brought on board, to assist in implementing tools and technologies, systems and procedures that allow the management team to be hands on without actually having to be physically hands on at all times.”
In order to ensure the company retains the insights that its hands on approach has been so effective at garnering while the number of brands and stores under its umbrella grows, Conyers has been keen to test a number of customer feedback solutions in stores.
The CXO explains how these in person initiatives are essential to a Caribbean, brick-and-mortar retail customer base:
“I’ve done a lot of voice of the customer work, in the past where we would do surveys via SMS, or WhatsApp, or e-mail for B2B consumers.
“But when you think of our brick-and-mortar stores, you have to be mindful of our environment where people are not as willing to share their e-mail address and some may not have one to share. Additionally, I am not convinced that survey’s are the solution”
Amongst her recent initiatives, a mystery shopping exercise has proved to be particularly insightful.
When asked about what advice she might give to other CX professionals who are considering running a feedback program, Conyers biggest tip was to avoid any exercise that adopts a “generic, blanket approach.”
Given her role involves working across a disparate range of brands, it is not hard to see why Conyers is so against a generic strategy.
Instead, she encourages companies to take both a local and international approach to discerning their customers’ habits and categorize them accordingly.
For example, Conyers used data and insights from international brands to instruct how she designed the mystery shopping experience – as she explains:
“Cole Haan provides us with training on how to get a customer to try on a shoe, as the data shows they are far more likely to actually buy it, because what differentiates Cole Haan is comfort!
“Similarly, for Levi's we have data from the brand that shows that 67% of customers that actually get in the fitting room are more likely to purchase, versus about 10% of customers who just sort of browse the store floor.”
These insights are then coupled with local observations on how customers react to customer service representatives on the shop floor, with Conyers championing what she terms the ‘more helping hand than hawk’ approach:
