Women’s apparel merchant Chico’s is well on its way toward achieving its goal of customer-centricity.
Customer engagement and brand loyalty are the cornerstones of Chico’s strategic goals. During the company’s Nov. 25 third-quarter financial results conference call, CEO Dave Dyer discussed Chico’s strategic initiatives.
“On omni-channel, we remain focused on creating a truly customer-centric experience,” Dyer said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “We have achieved our goal of having iPads in well over half of our stores prior to the holiday season. Our associates are using these tools to engage with our customers on an even more personal level. iPads allow our customers to access our digital commerce exclusive assortment while shopping in our boutiques. We are also making progress with our POS system replacement for 2015. We remain on target to begin the rollout in February. We have partnered with third parties to help us facilitate both the physical rollout and the necessary training and implementation on this new system. Having visited a good number of stores recently, I can tell you that our associates are eagerly awaiting this upgrade. Mobile checkout and easy access to customer style
preferences are just two of the customer-centric benefits that will come along with this new greatly enhanced system.”
In Chico’s stores, Dyer explained that with iPads store associates now have the ability to email those customers that have submitted their email addresses.
“Now we are able to tailor our communication to them specifically on what they like,” Dyer said. “We have also done what we call grow events in our stores, particularly the Chico’s bit. Grow means grassroots outreach that is where we actually go out to customers and to organizations and I think that we have homed that skill. And so there are a lot of things that we are doing at the store level with our outreach and with our customer contacts that are different than we have been doing in past years.”
Turning to customer loyalty, Dyer talked about the new Soma Rewards loyalty program, which is delivering on the key goal of increasing shopping frequency.
“Our customers have been redeeming their earn rewards at an impressive rate,” Dyer explained. “Soma continues to see strength in the sleepwear and loungewear categories which bodes well as we enter the holiday gift giving period.”
Chico’s FAS comprises the following brands: Chico’s, White House | Black Market, Soma Intimates, and Boston Proper. It’s a specialty retailer of private branded, sophisticated, casual-to-dressy clothing, intimates, complementary accessories, and other non-clothing gift items. The company operates 600 Chico’s boutiques and 100 outlets, 402 White House | Black Market boutiques and 45 outlets, and 206 Soma Intimates boutiques and 16 outlets, throughout the U.S., the District of Columbia, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Puerto Rico. Each brand publishes its own catalog and maintains its own ecommerce website: www.chicos.com, www.whbm.com, www.soma.com and www.bostonproper.com.