Enhancing the hybrid retail experience for our customers
We are constantly improving and adapting our customer experience to meet our clients’ requirements and their changing behaviours, such as the increase in the use of online platforms and the demand for faster service fulfilment. To achieve this, we initiated the Customer Experience (CX) program for our Group and our brands, designing how to build the human to human connection and also leveraging technology and data science to better understand and predict consumer behavior, without compromising on the privacy of our customers.
Customer Centricity
In 2018 we initiated the development of a new Customer Experience (CX) program for our Group, in alignment with our SHIFT’s North Star Vision of becoming a hybrid retailer. This initiative has enabled our brands to be more customer-centric and flexible in adapting to the changing requirements of our customers.
Our CX team’s mission is to create outstanding experiences and an adequate ecosystem to and deliver them by working jointly with our brands. Our CX program aims to centralise the Group-wide efforts across all brands, build internal awareness within the Group and map the customer journey of individual brands. In 2019, we piloted the CX program across the following workstreams:
We want to spread the CX culture across our Group and ensure that we have a solution-oriented mindset as well as the right processes in place to achieve our purpose. In order to achieve this, we have started to move away from a transactional approach and are instead building a human connection with our customers, aiming to cultivate long-lasting relationships, by putting greater effort into interacting with them.
To complement this, our back of the house and front of the house employees have been going through CX training programs. We have also increasingly engaged them in the CX community by organising and participating in talks, sharing best practices and encouraging knowledge sharing between our teams and brands. Furthermore, we launched our CX Academy, which will be embedded in the Chalhoub Retail Academy in 2020, as a means of increasing the spread of our CX culture.
We have supported 10 brands this year with dedicated resources to help them shape their CX strategy and design. Through this interaction with our brands, we have identified that brands are keen on engaging with us and with the involvement of our senior leadership, which they believe is key in ensuring a successful roll-out of the strategy.
Each of our brands is empowered to bring the CX Transformation to life, supported by our central team when required. A CX Champion, whose purpose is to drive the execution of CX transformation, has been assigned to each of our brands.
We want to put in place the infrastructure to measure our CX performance, and its impact on our business, with the ultimate goal of understanding any potential areas of improvements which might arise from this assessment. To compliment this, we will establish a system of omnichannel audits of our CX journeys to constantly improve our CX processes, including mystery shopping, social listening, and post-purchase Net Promoter Score.
To further our purpose of becoming a hybrid retailer in 2020, we aim to assist two additional brands in completing their customer journeys, by helping them transition to the implementation stage. We will also roll-out our CX program in KSA and explore new ways of measuring our frontliners’ performance by incorporating CX-related KPIs into their performance.
Building a New Luxury Experience
In 2019, we launched Chalhoub Group’s first-ever luxury experience customer loyalty program, MUSE, in the UAE and Kuwait, with a plan to roll-out in KSA, Qatar, Bahrain and Egypt in 2020. Moving away from the traditional Earn & Burn reward concept, the premium experiences we offer will be the driving force behind building emotional connections with our brands and long-term loyalty. With the goal of delivering meaningful memories at heart, we have created an Experience Matrix to ensure our members find value at every step of their MUSE journey.
Throughout the years, the Group has been at the backdrop of building our brands, but with the introduction of a Group-wide loyalty program, we can leverage our broad customer base and explore cross-brand engagements. In addition, we would be able to launch co-branding campaigns helping to reduce our marketing costs.
Using this online network, we can increase our efficiency and reduce our environmental footprint by minimising our delivery trips, offering digital receipts to customers and having a one-stop communication channel with our brands, colleagues and customer base.
By the end of 2019, 38 of our brands have become part of the MUSE ecosystem enabling us to enhance our customers’ experience and to build a community for them to engage with us. Through this, we have been able to achieve a 38% sales penetration in UAE, a 64% sales penetration in Kuwait and 9% cross brand sales. For the upcoming year, we aim to explore ways to engage our ‘MUSE’ registered members in a meaningful manner, by drawing on community-giving and environment protection experiences under our CSR programs.
Our new luxury loyalty experience will not only enhance the way we interact with our customers but will also allow them to be part of our sustainability mission, creating a greater impact for the community.”
