LOOPING YOU IN ON: HOW WE FOUND THAT OUR OWN EXPERIENCES APPLIED TO A WHOLE INDUSTRY

With a background as a sales associate in a clothing store I’ve experienced some challenges over the years when it comes to providing great customer service. Øistein and I both come from this background and our common experiences has laid most of the ground for what we’re now developing.

Øistein and I started to really conceptualize our ideas last year and, as Øistein mentioned in his “Meet the Looper”-post, we started doing research on product designs even before we found our engineering team. We initially worked with a couple of designers to get a jump start on what we should build, but before we could give these designers a product description, we needed to get a better understanding of the problem we were solving. My intention with this post is to let you guys in on some of the research we did early on.

Doing market research: What is actually the problem?

The first step for us was to find out which problems our market was facing, instead of focusing of what we thought was the problem. Through doing online research and talking with mentors, retailers and industry experts we learned a lot. It made us realize that the whole industry has a need for change. One of the biggest problems is that customer expectations and behaviors are changing rapidly while the brick-and-mortar industry has never significantly. Essentially, brick-and-mortars are providing generic customer experiences while shoppers are expecting personalized service.

In addition, we found that the high-end apparel stores were where it made sense for us to start. Customer service is crucial aspect, they have less customers per employee which gives them more time with each customer, and their products have high profit margins so each sale is extremely important to them.

We started using our network to get some intros to high-end apparel stores, but neither Øistein or I had ever worked in one ourselves. Though talking to people who are running chains and stores is valuable, we needed to get some inside information from the people who were delivering the customer service as well.

Using different perspectives to connect the dots

While Øistein met with executives, I walked around in the streets of San Francisco to ask associates in high-end apparel stores one question:

What challenges, if any, is there to working as a sales associate in a high-end store?

It was actually more time consuming and challenging than I thought it would be. Many of these stores would not allow me to ask questions to their staff, and the ones that did, only gave me one or two. But after half a day of walking around, I had talked to 12 associates from 8 different stores. Even though it’s a small number, the answers were all the same:

The biggest challenge is understanding your customer. We don’t know what people want, their needs, their lifestyle and so on which makes it hard to even start a conversation or give them product recommendations.

I asked all of them follow up questions like: How does this effect your job as a sales associate? What information would you like to know about your customer?

We learned that information such as: Price sensitivity, previous purchase history, sizes and preferences, lifestyle and how they plan to use certain products were questions that the associates needed to know to make the customer satisfied. But we also learned that accessing that information is hard and time consuming because it requires a relationship to be established between the shopper and the associate. We learned that some of these stores tried to keep track of these things through clientelling, but none of them did that digitally.

Now, since we only talked to 12 people that day, we could only make assumptions that their answers would count for the whole high-end apparel vertical. It turned out that Øistein learned about the same challenges through talking with executives, but from another point of view: Not knowing the customer creates potential loss in revenue and loyal customers, bit also makes it harder to hire the right employees.

We used the information to further work on our concept, asking the retailers if our solution could be something they would use to solve their problem. Turned out it was. Conclusion: Helping retail employees understanding their customers can increase revenue and market share.

What this research has meant for us

Through these studies we’ve been able to work on a solution that has a proven market. Later, we’ve learned that these challenges are not only prominent in high-end apparel stores, but they apply to stores that sell capital goods with high profit margins in a high-touch environment. The result of our research is that when we’re now moving towards our first pilots, they will be within four different verticals.

The lesson: Test all that can be tested and research all that can be researched. We know that it has helped find the problem, prove a market and now we’re hoping it will prove that we have the solution.