Stanley Lucas, AVP, Customer Intelligence & Insights, Ascena Retail Group compared his company’s transformation to the 1989 Kevin Costner film, “Field of Dreams.”
During his Wednesday session titled, “Build It and They Will Come: Creating a Customer Experience Hub,” at the 3rd Annual Engagement & Experience Expo, presented by Loyalty 360 – The Loyalty Marketer’s Association, Lucas told attendees how Ascena Retail Group has evolved into a customer experience hub.
Ascena Retail Group includes the following brands: Justice, maurices, Lane Bryant, Catherines, and dressbarn. It has 4,000 stores, $5 billion in annual sales, 22 million annual transactions; and 600,000 annual calls (but not transcribing them into text).
“We needed to be champions of this data,” Lucas said. “We had data that could easily influence what we did in our stores and marketing departments.”
Ascena Retail Group gathers feedback from customers and from a variety of places such as tech support questions and product feedback. Each of these areas on a website alone can help brands collect a plethora of feedback about different aspects of their businesses.
The idea for a Customer Experience Hub is to integrate all of these feedbacks so different departments aren’t looking at different elements of this data. Customer Experience Hub is the integration of all of these different data points.
Once all the data is integrated into the Hub, the key is creating intelligence around all of the data, structuring all text in a meaningful way, measuring and tagging the sentiment of the text -- and putting that intelligence into reporting analytics.
Lucas said the Customer Experience Hub can help break down department silos because it encourages collaboration among different departments and awakens people to the value of their own data.
The dream?
“Funnel all of this data into one spot,” Lucas said. “We wanted to match back to real transactional data and create a customer experience hub. The customer is emerging through social media.”
Ascena Retail Group’s journey started in 2009 and it implemented a solution from Clarabridge in 2011 after “everyone was onboard with what we wanted – to listen to our customers and educate stakeholders. Three years in and we’re changing to a more customer-centric ideology with automated data feeds and social media is now a regular stream of data into our data warehouse.”
Lucas shared that three years ago the customer insights team at Ascena Retail Group comprised five people. Now, the Customer Insights & Intelligence team comprises the following departments: Customer Insights, CRM & Analytics, Data Warehouse & Offshore, and Customer Care.
“We’ve absorbed the contact center, we’re closing the loop, and providing resolution,” Lucas explained.