Total retail transformation

A major luxury retailer was profitable but not capturing enough of the exploding high end market. They wanted to know, why did their best customers browse on their website but end up purchasing elsewhere? How could they drive new customers to stores? And why weren't customers responding to purchase triggers in the ways they used to?

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A new CEO challenged the C-suite to launch a total business transformation initiative to tackle the root issues holding them back and rethink their selling strategy for the new ways that luxury customers shop - passively consuming inspiration 24/7, moving fluidly between stores and digital channels, and driven to action by cues and motivations that are often unclear.

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The C Suite's goal was to launch an “elevated, connected customer experience” in the next year, but it didn’t have the foundational understanding of what to fix or what their goals should be, and could not begin this work.

Amplify was hired to uncover how luxury customers shopped today, and identify where the retailer's experience missed opportunities to acquire and develop them.

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In particular, we dove deep in two areas:

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Omni:  Amplify set out to map the many ways customers move between digital and in store channels during every part of the shopping journey, and how the brand's selling strategy should adapt to meet customers where they are.

Staff: Leadership knew that they left money on the table when staff didn't deliver the customer experience they wanted - but they didn't know why years of training didn't seem to help. Amplify focused on identifying the underlying causes of performance issues, and ways to transform the staff experience to be more effective.

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Amplify conducted a deep ethnographic study of today's customer and staff experiences - including embedding with staff in four stores to observe customers and staff in real life - to identify the forces at play and key moments that make or break the journey.

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Our work generated three foundational assets that the entire organization could adopt:

1. Three omnichannel journeys showing the main paths to purchase, and where the brand could convert or lose customers in each.
2. Skill models showing what staff needed to be able to do to deliver the desired customer experience - including what skills could be trained, and what could not - and quantitative performance metrics for delivering the expected customer experience.
3. A growth playbook showing the prioritized actions the retailer needed to take to stop losing its best customers, improve selling KPIs, and acquire new luxury customers.

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Most importantly, Amplify achieved C suite buy in on the path forward through a series of blockbuster workshops with the entire leadership team. We succeeded in aligning leadership on the problems to solve in today's experience, and facilitated decisions on which recommendations to include in the 2024 transformation roadmap. The organization is now implementing our plan to overhaul shift operations and staff training to focus more on one on one customer interactions.

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The transformation work we enabled will make this brand more competitive among luxury retailers and allow it to adapt to and succeed in the future of shopping.