Why customer insights matter: A chat with Anne Pascual
Zalando recently held its very first annual Customer Day. We caught up with our SVP for Product Design, Anne Pascual, to find out what this day is all about.
What is a Customer Day and why is the first event happening now?
Customers are at the centre of our everyday actions and decisions at Zalando, and we have diverse teams from across the business generating insights. We thought it would be a good idea to get those teams together to learn from each other and share with the rest of the company. Zalando recently passed the bar of 45 million active customers. This means we can now proudly state that every tenth European is an active Zalando customer! That’s quite an achievement, but it’s no time to rest.
As we keep increasing our customer base, it has never been more important (and challenging) to really get to know those customers, serve them better, and build even deeper relationships with them. We have ambitious growth targets, and delivering on them starts with putting ourselves in our customer’s shoes. Every day, our decisions and actions influence how customers feel about their Zalando experience, and that determines whether more or fewer customers see us as their personal Starting Point for Fashion.
Zalando is already customer focused — even obsessed — as a business. A dedicated Customer Day provides an opportunity to ask ourselves, “what can we do even better than we’re doing now”?
Why are customer insights so important?
First of all, customer insights help us to focus on the things that matter. There have always been loads of great ideas at Zalando, but we want to really focus on the ideas that can have the biggest positive impact on customers and also our partners. Insights help us identify where our focus needs to be to achieve this, solving the problems that really are worth solving.
Greater clarity on who we are serving, and what we want to achieve, also supports better, faster decision making. This applies to both long-term and short-term goals, and helps us keep a healthy balance between them.
Finally, customer insights enable us to collaborate better. Having a shared and more holistic understanding of our customers enables us to scale better as a team. Sharing insights reinforces shared goals, and best practice, and also identifies ways we can support each other to achieve these goals more effectively.
Can you give an example of customer insight in action?
Beauty is a great example, and something we’re currently very excited about. This year we’ve doubled down on creating an elevated Beauty experience, investing in this to become what we call a Proposition. A Propositions is a complete end-to-end customer experience that starts with clear customer needs, and works backwards to provide marketable solutions that deliver distinct benefits. Beauty is one such area, driven by a wealth of valuable customer insight.
There was already a lot of research conducted previously by various teams across Zalando, revealing how buying Beauty products is different from buying fashion in quite fundamental ways. We needed to put the research together and translate it into customer problems we want to solve, allowing teams to prioritise in terms of the most important improvements to make. There are currently over two hundred people working on these improvements so we can consistently surprise and delight with the experience we deliver. Watch this space for exciting developments which will be rolling out very soon for Beauty.
What were the main objectives for the first Customer Day?
One key objective is joining things up, sharing different perspectives so we can collectively deepen our customer understanding. There are pockets of deep knowledge about what our customers do, buy and value across different insight generating areas of the business. When we bring teams and insight generating tools together they provide rich and diverse learnings about customers. Sharing different perspectives provides more context, and helps us all take a much more holistic view.
On the other hand it’s important that we localise our offer too. Zalando currently operates across 23 European markets. Since 2019, we have made it our mission to become the Starting Point for Fashion in every one of those markets — acting like a friend you always go to for all things fashion and lifestyle. So an important question we can address collectively is how can we incorporate local nuances, and the understanding of specific customer groups and needs, more into our offering? In 2021, we created the Markets organisation to drive this ambition to the next level, creating the most exceptional, locally relevant experiences, based on a deep understanding of local culture, preferences, habits, and competitors. A dedicated Customer Day provides one way to see where we stand in terms of these objectives.
What was the key takeaway from the day?
To sum it up, it would be the recognition of both diversity and universality in working with customer insights. Gaining different perspectives from different locales is really important, if we are going to serve those markets in terms of needs and expectations. Fashion is partly a celebration of identity, and Diversity and Inclusion is fundamental to our mission to be the Starting Point of Fashion for all.
Yet there are also universal needs that all our customers share, and by coming together, we can remind ourselves of that universality. By sharing a wealth of insights and learnings we can build our brand and scale our business on something fundamental, unwavering and universally valued by our customers.
