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Cluster Reply solution for clienteling

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The need to have a clienteling app for fashion luxury companies arises from observing that sales associates are used to communicate with customers using their own personal phones for marketing purposes.
Proposing new product, presenting new fabrics, keeping up to date customers about any sartorial changes on clothes purchased, are some of the main communication topics. In most cases this kind of communication takes place without any control about “tone of voice” used by the sales associates and quality of any images sent to customers even if it works. This app allows companies headquarters to track and control any action and any content exchanged with the purpose to guarantee high quality marketing communications through a variety of channels. The need to have an accessible worldwide application, since the stores are located across the world, is satisfied by the Microsoft Azure cloud platform, adopting the IaaS service model (Infrastructure as a Service)
The possibility to track communication allows companies’ headquarters to provide gamification initiatives by pushing automatic tasks to be accomplished by sales associates within an established time frame in order to obtain extra recognitions. Moreover, a clienteling app offers an effective tool for storing the agenda management. 

The application:
The web application is designed in order to supply clienteling’s tools like the one-to-one communication between salesmen and customers through mobile devices, tablets and desktop, exploiting Azure’s flexibility and scalability. The purpose of the clienteling app proposed by Cluster Reply is to establish a relationship of closeness and trust between customers and sales associates inviting the customers to embrace the brand vision and values in a direct way and gaining loyalty.

The web application works on mobile devices, tablets and desktops and is designed to support one-to-one communication between sales assistants and customers. The app behaves as a hub for data stored in the different company tools and it is able to retrieve and present information about customers, products, stores and sales associates from these systems. The app focal point is the conversation center, a section that allows sales associates to manage personalized communications with customers using brand elements approved by the company headquarter.

Sales associates can choose one of the available channels and use contents compliant with the brand image giving the possibility to customize communication elements at the same time.

Loyalty is obtained via targeted marketing actions. This kind of actions can be driven through the clienteling app by defining periodic tasks that will be assigned to each sales associate based on his own customer portfolio. Tasks are defined at headquarter level and are aimed to specific marketing targets. By logging in the app with his own credentials each salesperson will be able to view the tasks assigned and complete them choosing a channel and sending a communication.

Each activity targets a single customer with the goal of obtaining personalized and targeted communication. These marketing actions can have different goals: store event invitations, product proposals, birthday wishes, actions aimed to customers who are not active. The

Clienteling tool allows, in other words, to move from a "one to many" relationship to a “one-to-one”.

This makes feasible to obtain that the impersonal communications, typical of massive marketing, are fully replaced by a direct connection between sales associate and customer. This approach enables a positive feeling towards the sales assistant, the store and the brand and encourages loyalty by offering a store experience customized for the specific customer needs. The tool provides a way to keep under control the contents exchanged with the customers, to ensure the quality of the conversations, and to launch gamification initiatives with WeChat, a mix between a messaging app and a social network. Without integrating this channel, it would be almost impossible to reach customers of that region.

The store geographical position had a significant role for the infrastucure design. The driver that suggests us to rely on the Azure Cloud Platform is the datacenters’ worldwide presence that guarantees high level in performance.
A very common fashion brand marketing action is to invite customers to join events or individual experiences in the stores. The reasons can be multiple: new product presentation, tailor-made clothing fitting and so on.
The app offers for these purposes a personal and a store agenda, management functionality by which sales assistants can book appointment by specifying customer, date, time and any notes (such as size or particular customer requests). The clienteling application is the keystone of the Omni channel strategy, for a constant growth of business objectives.  

The benefits
Why should you opt for a Cloud-based application for a clienteling app?
  • Scalability: dynamic resources based on the load demand
  • Data persistence and availability: data access is always guarantee thanks to the redundancy and the hardware resources provided by Cloud
  • Geographical independence: data centers are located across the world
  • Hardware management: hardware is configured and managed by the cloud provider, reducing the costs of IT infrastructure and maintenance
  • Cost-effectiveness: pricing is based on the resource usage

Conclusion
Encourage loyalty through one-to-one communications between salespeople and customers, this is the goal of clienteling. In this context, establishing and maintaining a relationship of trust with the brand is essential. This goal can be achieved only by overcoming the barriers of impersonal communication. The clienteling app represents an effective solution since it allows informal communication and targeted marketing actions but, at the same time, a strong control of companies headquarters on exchanged contents in order to guarantee a high quality experience compliant with luxury brand vision.