Omni-channel and User-Experience Strategy Proposal: Cos Bar

There is something intriguing about David and Goliath-type narratives. We hear about them all the time when start-ups disrupt an industry and gain the upper-hand against their incumbent. Despite all the talks about, “what’s new”, the era of customer service and personalization is back and it is back in a big way.
Today, customers have the tools and the freedom to decide what, when, and where they will buy. They have the ability to access an entire global market on their mobile phones and look for brands and stores that will best suit their particular needs. Whether they are looking for the best deals, promotions, online/offline experience, or membership awards, customers ultimately choose whether or not to shop your brand.
To succeed in today’s market, companies must carve out their niche and successfully implant their brand into the minds of the customers.
For over 40 years, Cos Bar has provided luxury cosmetics to affluent women in cities like Aspen, Newport Beach, and Carmel. Rather than scaling rapidly like most companies, Lily Garfield, the Founder of Cos Bar, garnered an army of loyal clients who continue to shop at her stores, searching for the world’s best cosmetic brands.
With their first recent outside funding from a private equity firm, Cos Bar is looking to update and refine its online strategy. Scaling a business is a daunting challenge, especially when you consider how it could affect company culture and introduce new challenges at both micro and macro levels.
Objective
Articulate which offline/online strategies and technologies Cos Bar should utilize as they triple their brick-and-mortar footprint to fifty stores.
Questions I Wanted to Answer
- How can Cos Bar create a cohesive online and offline strategy to create a more seamless customer experience?
- How can Cos Bar gain valuable customer insights to continue to refine and improve its omni-channel and marketing strategies?
- What single key omni-channel feature is currently missing and what can be done to implement it?
Bridging Online with Offline
Despite the many advantages of online-only retailers, brick-and-mortar stores provide personal, tactile, and human experiences that cannot be replicated online. Customer service has been Cos Bar’s competitive edge and a large contributor of its longstanding success. This competitive edge will play an increasingly vital role in Cos Bar’s overall strategy as it continues to scale. Its offline strategy must work in tandem by uniting traditional advantages with key success elements of the digital experience.
“The more profitable play is to coax online shoppers to come into your stores” — Harvard Business Review by Fue Zeng, et. al.
Regardless of how accessible or user-friendly the Cos Bar website may be, its online store should play a supporting role in its brick-and-mortar strategy. The primary reason is that Cos Bar’s target audience consists of affluent women above the age of 35. Their needs and expectations are drastically different than, say, Sephora’s younger and more, “discount oriented” target audience.
Cos Bar is a luxury cosmetics company with a specific clientele who has high expectations regarding customer care and personalized experiences. Price is hardly an issue for Cos Bar’s target customer base.
It is common for employees at Cos Bar retail stores to address clients by name.
As such, you can be confident that Cos Bar clients enjoy the end-to-end experience that only traditional brick-and-mortar stores can provide.

User experience (Mobile)
I suspect Cos Bar built its website using Javascript (Node.js) with a Python or Ruby back-end framework, which provides an excellent foundation for a satisfying user experience. However, I also believe that Cos Bar should re-platform its mobile architecture (i.e. invest in building their own Android and iOS app) rather than settle for its existing responsive web application.
Mobile Moment Audit
Cos Bar’s online (mobile) strategy should provide clients with an easy, one-touch way to conveniently:
- sign into their accounts to access their B. Cos rewards/points page
- browse the product catalog
- easily discover new products
- order products online when they are physically unavailable at the store
- create a wishlist
- locate the nearest Cos Bar retail store
- connect with a customer service representative
Mobile engagement is not just an extension of your self-service website.
I believe that having its own app can provide Cos Bar with the necessary ingredients to personally serve, reward, and celebrate its community of loyal clients. Unfortunately, it is not enough to simply build the app and stop there. It will take a disciplined approach to understanding what problems to solve, how to design the best solution, what systems would be affected, and what analytics will be needed to keep improving the application.
The IDEA (Identify, Design, Engineer, Analyze) cycle can significantly help this process along. It has the right framework to align all your different stakeholders and help you plan and successfully execute your mobile strategy.

The IDEA framework will help:
- product teams see how to design a better user experience
- operation teams see what processes need to change
- technology management staff understand the requirements of the new technology platform
To ensure the largest return on investment (ROI) for building the app, teams should follow the agile development framework to deliver frequently improved releases.

Gaining Customer Insights From Cos Bar’s Unique Clientele
Cos Bar’s locations are small and often tailored to their neighborhood environment. Take the Aspen store and the New Jersey store. The former is starkly different from the latter in terms of what the ambiance of the store is, what kind of music played, which products are displayed, and what types of customers enter. For example, clients at the Aspen location are more likely to purchase products that will help their skin deal with dry weather than New Jersey clients are. It is crucial that Cos Bar doesn’t allow its online/offline strategies to become static across the organization.
Complimenting the company’s use of Retail Next to gather quantitative data, Cos Bar employees are also collecting qualitative data that can uncover customer behaviors, spot customer issues, and identify other key customers insights. Using these insights, Cos Bar can provide the products and services that best serve their customer base.
Sales individuals are the voice of the company to the clients.
When sales teams are able to predict what their customers want and offer targeted solutions, they become more than just a simple salesperson. Fostering authentic relationships with customers drastically improves sales and facilitates customer loyalty.
The ability to combine qualitative and quantitative data can help the sales team capitalize on up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
By keeping a line of communication open between the sales team and the corporate team, Cos Bar can keep a pulse on the unique demands and insights of each brick-and-mortar store nationwide.

The Must-Have Omni-Channel Feature
One key feature of a successful omni-channel strategy is to allow customers to access and manage all of their activities from any of their devices. If a customer adds an item to their shopping cart or wishlist using their desktop computer, Cos Bar’s centralized cloud system should automatically update changes across all customer devices.
To find out why this feature wasn’t applied yet, I called Cos Bar’s Newport Beach retail location and spoke to Elaine, a sales representative.
Backstory: My mother created a long wishlist on the Cos Bar website using her desktop the night before. The next day, she headed to the Newport Beach retail store but was unable to access her wishlist of products on her account using her smartphone.
Our conversation:
Elaine: Hello, this is Cos Bar, Elaine speaking.
Me: Hi Elaine. I have a quick question about creating a wishlist.
Elaine: Sure, how many I help you?
Me: Great, so my mother created a wishlist filled with products she wanted to learn more about and perhaps purchase last night on her desktop. When she tried to access her wishlist on her smartphone, her wishlist was empty. I was wondering what the problem might be.
Elaine: Was she signed into her account when she created her wishlist?
Me: Yes.
Elaine: I see. The thing is.. I’m not too familiar with the technical side of things. That would be more for the technical team to figure out.
Me: Do you think it might be because her account has two different settings depending on which device she is on?
Elaine: I suspect that might be but this is what I can do. When she comes in, I can pull up her account on our computers here and I can print out her wishlist for her so she doesn’t have to start from scratch.
Me: Okay, Elaine. Thanks so much! I’ll let her know.
Elaine: Is there anything else I can help you with?
Me: No, I think that is it. You have been very helpful. I appreciate your help.
Elaine: Of course, thank you for calling.
Elaine was honest with me when I asked her a technical question that she could not answer. She offered to help my mother in any way she could to get rid of any inconveniences.
Cos Bar does not seem to have a dedicated cloud-based CRM database that constantly updates between devices yet. A seamless omni-channel experience has the potential to provide benefits to both the company and the customer. By eliminating any barriers that would impede clients from taking action, Cos Bar can scale its customer-centric mindset across the organization.
“Customers no longer tolerate fragmented engagement across different channels.” — Scott McCorkle, CEO, Salesforce Marketing Cloud
There are two potential solutions to resolve this key issue:
- Invest time and resources to set-up an internal cloud-based CRM database to handle account information between all the different platforms
- Integrate a third-party web application like Kibo or Orckestra to Cos Bar’s backend systems

If you enjoyed this post, check out my article on Zappos where I talk about how the company creates great customer experiences.
Update: Cos Bar has resolved their back-end issue, allowing customers to save their wishlist and other relevant shopping information on their accounts regardless of the device they are using.
