Gap CEO Wants to Win Customer Experience at Moment of Truth

Customer experience is the true differentiator for so many brands, a point not lost on Gap CEO Arthur L. Peck. Capturing that “moment of truth” is what separates the good companies from the great ones.

“Historically in this business, the moment of truth was when a customer crossed the leased line into a store,” Peck explained during the company’s Feb. 25 fourth-quarter conference call, according to Seeking Alpha.

“Today, as a company, we are increasingly seeing the moment of truth is when a customer, through their phone, comes into our digital store and we either win or lose their affection, their engagement, and, ultimately, their sales if we win or lose at that moment of truth.”

Gap places a high premium on customer experience.

“We’re modernizing our POS,” Peck said. “We’ve built a number of omnichannel capabilities. We’ve virtualized our inventory so that we have access to all of our inventory across all of our demand. The thing that I am really excited about is the accelerating pace of mobile and the mobile experience that we have. Historically, we’ve operated our websites in two separate platforms. We’re in the process of bringing those together on a fully responsively designed website. And most importantly, we’re going through a cultural change inside the company of really thinking digital first and mobile first.”

As a result, that creates an opportunity, but also an imperative to move as fast as the customer is moving in mobile, Peck noted

“This year, the bulk of our traffic will be mobile traffic to our digital space,” he said. “That represents an opportunity because a great majority of that traffic is incremental, but it also means that we offer the customer an emotional, immersive, holistic, engaging brand experience along with what we have historically done extremely well, which is a very efficient ecommerce transactional experience.”

What’s more, Peck stressed product quality.

“We are, at our core, a fashion apparel company and our customers come to us for great, emotional on-trend, on-brand product,” he explained. “And a lot of the work that we have been doing in 2015 is continuing to move our brands forward to get centered on their aesthetic, centered on the right trends, to restore the appropriate quality to our products and really put in place the products in our stores that we know that our customers love. And I am really pleased with the quality of the work and the quantity of the work and the pace of the work that we've been doing across the entire company against our product priorities. I am a true believer in quality, a big believer in quality and I believe that our customers are very sophisticated when it comes to understanding the value that we offer them in our products. And I’m extremely pleased with the quality restoration that I see in Gap’s products and in Banana Republic as we look at the spring assortment and the summer assortment going forward.”

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