We had the pleasure of hosting Andrew Wang, Sr. Manager, Product Management at The Gap; Laura Poatsy, Mobile Experience Supervisor at Lilly Pulitzer; and Sophia Huang, Sr. Product Manager at Gilt for a conversation on mobile conversion at our Customer Love Summit.
Although The Gap, Lily Pulitzer, and Gilt approach their retail strategies differently, they all share one common trait: These brands are laser-focused on mobile conversion through improving customer love.
In the video below, our panelists share how they earn customer love through mobile innovation, and how that drives tangible business results by increasing conversion, retention, loyalty, and ultimately, revenue. The experts then share actionable advice on how to measure the success of mobile innovation and the ROI of customer love, and how to create a seamless omnichannel experience.
If you’d rather read than listen, you can check out the full transcript below. Enjoy!
Transcription
Dina: Good morning, everybody. How about this view, right? So, just getting started with our panel, “What’s Love Got to Do With it?” Specifically creating really compelling experiences that convert. I want to get started by having our fine panelists briefly introduce themselves. Just kind of a little information about your title and role. Maybe start with Laura.
Laura: Hi, my name is Laura Poatsy. I’m with Lilly Pulitzer. For those who don’t know who Lilly Pulitzer is, we’re a women’s clothing retailer that specialize in bright blue printed clothing resort wear. I am the Mobile Experience Supervisor there, so it’s my job to make sure that whether you’re on our native app or our mobile website, that you’re having a superior experience. Yeah.
Sophia: I’m Sophia Huang, Senior Project Manager at Gilt, otherwise known as HBC Digital. We have a bunch of umbrella brands under our offering, and primarily we’re speaking about Saks Fifth Avenue here, working on mobile styling project, and we’ll speak further.
Andrew: My name is Andrew Wang. I’m a project manager at Gap Inc. I recently helped lead a team that launched four brand new iOS apps for our four brands. Now, I’m working on solar technologies and evaluating and experimenting with emerging technologies for our store space.
Dina: And your moderator, Dina. I do product strategy at a company called Prolific Interactive. We’re a mobile agency that does product design, development, strategy, as well as mobile growth. We have the privilege of working with wonderful companies like these. I just want to add a little bit of context, so that if you are in retail eCommerce, obviously these folks are very relevant to you. If you’re not, they’re still facing some really interesting challenges or working on some really interesting opportunities that I think is good context.
For Lilly Pulitzer for example, and we’ll get more into this, currently working on and digging into machine learning. It also is a multi-generational brand, which I think is really interesting from the context of trying to serve and speak to different generations of customers, especially as Millennials.
For Sophi recently, as part of that mobile styling, digging into iMessage. Recently launched an iMessage app. Really kind of interesting consideration in terms of conversational commerce. And for Gap, in case you don’t know, it is like a multi-brand company, right? So, under the umbrella of Gap brands is Old Navy, Banana Republic, Athleta and Gap. Within the last year, they switched all four brands over from a hybrid app to native apps. So, I know that’s kind of a big consideration for folks, is what format, what platform, what makes the most sense?
With that, first and most important question about “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” is, what do we mean when we say love? I would love to hear from each of these panelists on what does love look like in terms of your mobile experience and how do you measure that? How do you know that you’ve delivered love to your users?
Laura: I can start. Our app is mainly geared toward providing that superior shopping experience that she’s used to, in any of our channels, but then also using the app as a portal to engage with the brand. Giving her kind of a differentiating factor that has her keep coming back to the app and enhancing her brand experience. We have a very loyal following, so our consumers are really, really hungry for anything that we throw out at her. So, using the app as a way to kind of engage with her and allow her to discover the brand. It definitely is way more of an engagement tool than a revenue driver, so we’ve really focused on retention and loyalty in that respect. So, that’s how I know she loves us.
Dina: Thank you. How about you, Sophi?
Sophia: Sure. I’m probably aware that not many of you understand what iMessage is. It’s actually an app within, sort of, Apple that allows you to send text and build upon iOS update feature. There’s more robust capabilities to it. For love in particular, our understanding is that the customers are taking a lot of their commerce decisions in the conversational chat of their everyday with their family and friends. So, understanding where the customer is at and then building a product to serve and be where the customers are so we can help you make your buying purchase decisions and reduce friction to check out.
Andrew: For Gap, one of the ways we show love for our customers or for our users is that we try to make everything as simple and seamless as easy for them to use. One of our key target personas that we model towards is the really busy working mom. She shops deals for her family and she shops for herself. We try to make it easy to surface deals and promos for her to do her shopping, to browse and to check out. We hear that in the reviews and in ratings all the time.
Dina: It’s interesting seeing the very different kind of usage and perspective on what love can look like. For the purpose of the next few questions, let’s say that delivering love to your users is all about not just meeting but exceeding their expectations. To start, because it’s more of a fun approach, let’s talk about when you guys didn’t meet expectations. So, other end of the spectrum. I’m gonna say “hate,” but customers were not thrilled with what you did. What happened and how did you know that you failed to deliver love? Let me start with Andrew.
Andrew: For us, as Dina mentioned earlier, we were moving from hybrid apps to brand new redesigned native iOS apps. Our existing customers are very loyal. They’re very passionate about our brands, so they were very used to the features that were available on the hybrid apps. When we decided to redesign and launch, we did a very MVP version. So it was very basic. Shop, browse, check out, and buy. We left out a certain number of features that we didn’t realize that our customers, or really passionate customers used many, many times. One of those, for example, is, right off the bat we left out product reviews.
We got a lot of feedback that our customers, when they shop in stores, they actually used the app, not to covert but to help them decide on products as they’re browsing the stores. We quickly fixed that and put that back in, in the follow-up version. We’re constantly learning from our mistakes, listening to our customers.
Dina: Thank you for admitting to mistakes. I appreciate that. Do you guys have examples of times where you failed to deliver the love?
Sophia: iMessage is a product that’s built from scratch at Saks, and unfortunately we don’t have enough data yet to say we failed. However, I want to quote sort of a case study from my time at CheapOair. It’s a travel agency that allows you to book hotels, car rentals and also flights online. You would expect that based on certain criteria after you click on that search, in the flight search results, all the listings on there is gonna meet your criteria. However, due to business drivers, we understand that CheapOair is a cheap…having the “Cheap” in its brand name, understand that a lot of customers are actually price sensitive.
In the flight search results, in the top priority two sections, it’s actually flexible dates. Once you run a search, we didn’t actually serve you the flights that meet your criteria, and a lot of customers are confused and are calling customer service and whatnot. From business sort of point of view, it ended up being about 12% of our revenue driver. We understand there’s a lot of frustration and also confusion around that flight search result not meeting your expectation. However, it’s also, as a product manager, finding sort of the balance between business drivers and customer goals.
Laura: As I mentioned earlier, we really use the app as an engagement tool with our consumer. About 70% of our consumer base on the app is driven by our top 10% of our revenue paying customer, so they are super loyal to the brand and they’re really used to knowing everything first and really having that exceptional experience. We did not realize that with our app consumer until much later. We were super segmenting our push notification and doing them a little bit delayed at some point. So, the consumer that was signing up for the push notifications wasn’t getting that information. She wasn’t the first to know, and she let us know that she expected to have that…the app for her is that kind of superior driver for her shopping experience and she really expected us to give her all the information and upfront and she really wanted to be the first to know. So, having kind of that feedback to be able to retail our strategy and really make it… We don’t have a loyalty program but really use the app, it’s a way to serve as the loyalty program is one of our many mistakes.
Dina: Flipping it around, if you want to continue. What’s a situation or feature where you did deliver love and you saw that in terms of your KPIs and business results? What’s something positive?
Laura: One of the biggest product redesigns that we did was redesigning our discover page, which is what 90% of our consumers that organically come to the app will land on. Previously, before the redesign, it was a very static feature. We had redesigned it a few times but just couldn’t get it quite right, and it was mainly because it was really static and cumbersome to manage. We did a complete overhaul, made it way more dynamic, interwove some of, like I said, these brand engagement features that we have. iMessage emojis and photo frames and UGC, which is user generated content. You know, pulling social feeds in and then scattering product in through that. It was way more dynamic, way more engaging. It gave her a variety of ways to shop and get to the conversion at the end of the funnel. We had an overwhelming response from right off the bat and continuing still to this day.
Dina: What did that look like? Was it reviews? Did you see the numbers change?
Laura: Yeah, definitely KPIs. Discover was one of our biggest places of drop-off. And so, you know, having that be your landing page is a little bit alarming. So, actually getting her to go through the conversion funnel was one of the first things. We saw session length increase, obviously more events. And then, yes, obviously through Apptentive. She’s very vocal. She likes to be heard. Our consumer likes to be heard. So, we definitely know when we’re doing something wrong and we definitely know when we’re doing something right. She definitely shared the love with us through a variety of ways.
Dina: Cool. How about you, Andrew? What are one of the wins or features that really clearly delivered love?
Andrew: Yeah, for us it’s something that’s super, super simple. It’s basically Touch ID. It’s something that’s available on all iOS devices. For us, when we built our app, we are leveraging our ecomm back end, our APIs, so we are tied to our ecomm rules. One of the things that we were tied to with the old hybrid app was 30-minute time outs. So every 30 minutes, all our customers have to log back in using that little keyboard.
But when we did a redesign and then a version later we put in Touch ID, it was easy. Like, it goes back to what we were saying before. We want all our users to have a simple and easy experience, and this was just something that you don’t really think about but it really saves time for our users. We heard about it. We tend to have two different types of feedback, like from new users or loyal users that have been with us since the hybrid app, and this was just easy win for both types.
Dina: How about you, Sophi?
Sophia: As I mentioned, we’re still in early phases of the project and not so much in sort of defining success moments. However, what’s interesting about this project is that we’re building a product to allow you to have a personal shopper at scale, with customers in the conversational interface. So leveraging the expertise of all the fashion authoritative experts of Saks Fifth Avenue and then connecting it to the everyday customer, which you’ll have a personal shopper to talk to at any point in time in conversations.
Currently, it’s a two-sided platform. On the one hand, we’re looking at customers. On the other, we’re measuring success in terms of stylists. We have ran a handful of workshops in the stores. And with the support of Prolific Interactive, we were able to get great feedback and comments from the stylists that we ran training with. Of 50 stylists in the stores, about at least 10 of them expressed interest in carrying this further, and it just streamlines our workflow and in store selling experience. That’s the best feedback we’ve gotten.
Dina: Cool. Yeah, I think it’s interesting what you point out, Andrew, is that delivering love and a win in conversion, it doesn’t always have to be the biggest, most obvious, latest technology. It can be something very simple. It really all comes down to understanding what your core expectations are from the customer and what they really need and want. Sometimes it can be something simple and straight forward and may seem obvious and like all apps have it, but you deliver it and it can make a world of difference depending on who your user is.
Andrew: Yeah, exactly. For us, it’s something that she probably didn’t even notice but it’s just like something that’s in her head and she’s already expecting it and we just made that happen for them.
Laura: I would say we have actually switched a good majority of our road map for this year to really focusing on these simple wins that are gonna make a huge impact. We’re adding order tracking to the app so that she can just use that. Meeting her in these mobile moments and these things seem so simple to us but they really do make a huge impact. We’ve switched from kind of those shiny objects to making these very simple adjustments that are really gonna make her meet her customer expectations.
Dina: This coming from the person who is also starting to work on machine learning, speaking of shiny objects. I wanted to kind of switch over to some of the hot topics. We hear about things, some of them have been around for a little bit, some are a little bit newer. Conversational commerce, things like personalization, omni-channel experiences. So, starting with a little bit about personalization. There’s a whole spectrum of what that could look like, right? As far as what you guys are looking into, how did you decide to get into this? What does that look like and what does it mean for your business?
Laura: Yeah, so personalization just as a company, you know, from marketing to the ecomm side is a keyword both internally and obviously, we all know, externally. That was a big challenge for us, is finding ways to integrate that throughout the entire customer experience. We were presented an offer from one of our partners to be part of a beta that is ultimately gonna lend itself to one-to-one machine learning experience.
We are the first in the app space, with this company, to do that. We wanted to dip our toe in the water and our website has little bits of it scattered throughout. So we took some of the learnings that our website has and really pulled them over into the app side. We’re launching, hopefully, on Friday, so stay tuned. But, you know, machine learning is a very, very long journey. We’ve experimented it in different ways to get personalization, whether it be location services and really meeting her there.
Like I said, it’s a long journey but the end goal for us is to have a completely personalized experience so that when she comes…if Sophia and I are looking at our app, she’s seeing something that’s completely tailored to her. This first experiment that we’re doing is very basic but allowing us to just let the machine learn. It’s geared towards our three main life cycle personas and showing her specific content as to where we believe she is, based on her life events and then kind of building on it from there. So, stay tuned but that’s our first experiment and we’re excited to get going in there.
Dina: Just a little bit more because it’s super interesting. For this first phase, from a customer’s perspective, am I gonna see anything different or is it just the machines doing its thing and picking up information?
Laura: What you’ll see, there’s gonna be a new module added to our Discover page. It’s just gonna be catalogued marketing content that you’ll see. She won’t see a huge change. The best part about machine learning is hopefully that you don’t know there’s a machine behind it. We want to make sure that she isn’t seeing anything alarming and that it’s very cohesive with the experience that she’s used to and obviously adds and builds on that rather than takes away.
Dina: Cool. I think the other really interesting consideration for other folks who are looking into something like this. How have you been able to do it or what does it mean for your company in terms of resources, like internally? I think you said you’re partnering with somebody, but in terms of what it takes from a technology perspective, people perspective, to even just dip your toe into that?
Laura: We’re really lucky and we’re able to partner with one of the companies that we work with. From a resource perspective, that definitely took off a lot of the burden. But internally, we’re a very lean, small team. With app and web, we’re about 20 people. That includes all of our engineers, all of our product owners, operations managers, that type of stuff, UX designers. We’re still pretty lean. And so, this definitely was a huge initiative that we knew going into this year was something that we wanted to focus on and planned for it accordingly so that it was a big piece on our road map. It was a huge priority.
For our website especially, we definitely rallied around it. There’s a lot that goes into the prep work. Like your CRM system has to be impeccable. There’s a lot of data that needs to be clean and right before you can even start talking about implementing the machine. There is a lot of integrations on that side that we needed to make sure was accurate and going well, and then, of course, just the general implementation. Like I said, it’s a partner that we have been working with for a while. We use them for A/B testing on our website. So, thankfully, that integration was already put in place and we just had to kind of just take it that next step further, but definitely it was something that we planned for and made a big priority.
Dina: Nice. Cool. Thanks for sharing all that. My hope is that you guys learn enough that you want to come and chat with these folks afterwards and get more information about what they’re thinking, what they’re doing. I would love to dig in a little bit more on the conversational commerce front to hear about what the direction of an iMessage app versus, let’s say, a chat bot and how you’re rolling it out and how you know when you’ve achieved customer love and really kind of delivered a win for the business?
Sophia: Sure. We’re thinking of it in two parts. iMessage actually has a stand-alone app store within your chat bubble. To all your friends and family, there is a separate app store to download iMessage and it acts as a stand-alone or a package as extension of iOS app. To that end, it helps you send photos, text, stickers and basically acts as a view within the conversation wit
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