Gap Customer EngagementDuring his company’s third-quarter earnings conference call on Nov. 19−which saw sales drop 2.9%, to $3.85 million from the same period last year−Gap CEO Art Peck talked about mobile as a big opportunity to create increased customer engagement.

“To me, the big issue and the big opportunity, and it’s both an issue and an opportunity, is the continued growth of mobile traffic,” Peck explained, according to Seeking Alpha. “Anybody who is telling you the truth will tell you that it’s become probably a majority of their traffic, growing very-very fast. And so we are really aggressively focused on making sure that as our traffic pivots from a desktop or a laptop or even a tablet onto a mobile device that we’re able to monetize that traffic.”

And that starts with a responsive design that delivers a great mobile experience off of one website, “but then making sure that the shopping experience is easy, greater use of imagery versus text, a great checkout experience, capital applied promotion capabilities which we put in place,” Peck said. “And so making sure that the experience is both emotional, immersive, and aspirational on a mobile device as a brand experience, but also transactionally efficient as a customer buying on the mobile device. That’s probably the biggest opportunity that we’ve got right now, and we’re very aggressively focused on it. It’s moving very quickly. We’re excited about it. Our traffic is growing, but the mobile device experience is different than a desktop experience. And we need to make sure that we can make money there in the same way that we can make money on the other real estate.”

Monitoring customer reviews has become critical to understanding the disparate customer expectations.Gap and mobile

“And I mentioned on the call that I look at reviews,” Peck added. “If you look at reviews, if you get into our stores and talk to our customers, we have a process called Voice of the Customer where we listen to feedback very specifically, we do consumer insights. There is a 100% consistency with what our customers want, what is not working for them, across all of those touch points. And those are the things the teams are acting on, in both Gap and Banana, to get the product back centered to where its needs to be.”

Peck is a firm believer in past performance.

“As you improve your products, we don’t plan on making huge marketing investments as we get into the beginning of next year,” he explained. “I think that’s imprudent. You improve your product, the customer discovers it, you start to see conversion move on the basis of the traffic that you have in the store. Word of mouth, these days, it’s a super powerful form of marketing. If you just think about Instagram and Pinterest and the other social media, that’s a very powerful form of marketing. And that will start to bring traffic in.”

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