Choosing the right Clienteling solution can make or break the customer experience. The best solutions enable seamless, personalized interactions across multiple touchpoints—whether in-store, online, via SMS, email, or social media. The goal is to engage customers at the right moment with relevant, contextualized communication.
On the flip side, a weak clienteling system can lead to disjointed interactions, lack of integration, and missed opportunities for meaningful engagement. To help retailers navigate this space, we’ve outilined the essential features to look for in clienteling software, along with key trends and data-driven insights. Read on to discover which features drive success and why they matter.
Live chat and messaging
When it comes to delivering quick assistance to customers, having a live chat and messaging options on an e-commerce site is becoming a must. It has become part of every generation’s reflex to get help and assistance through those channels, according to a recent McKinsey study. On this graphic we can see that their likelihood of engaging through live chats and text messaging is around 78% on average, all generations combined.
Emailing is not the preferred method of communication for quick answers, but it remains an integral part of a good customer service and retention strategy.
Although email communication has traditionally been managed by marketing departments, there is now an expectation for individual stores or sales managers to respond to client inquiries and send personalized offers directly to customers.”
This shift aligns with the growing emphasis on personalized customer experiences, which have been shown to yield significant benefits. For instance, companies that implement personalization at scale often see a lift in total sales, primarily by enhancing loyalty and increasing share-of-wallet among already-loyal customers. Managing emails through the same clienteling software as other engagement channels will also allow retailers to have a better overview of their customers’ preferences and past interactions.
Video calls
With the rise of live virtual shopping events, video is quickly becoming a standard communication channel for online shoppers. A Stellar Global study found that 66.2% of respondents would feel more comfortable consulting with an expert via video before making a significant online purchase.This is particularly relevant for products like beauty treatments or technology, where informed decisions require expert knowledge.
Reporting & Analytics
When selecting the right software, it’s crucial to ensure it includes a robust reporting feature. In the retail industry, having a detailed overview of multiple stores’ operations enables retailers to adapt to demand, assess the effectiveness of their clienteling strategy, and identify potential blind spots when issues arise. An effective clienteling software should provide retailers with comprehensive tracking of key performance indicators (KPIs), outreach insights, and sales associates’ proactiveness, all within a single platform. Here are the essential KPIs it should track, divided in 4 categories:
Customer Service
- Request Reply Time
- Outstanding requests
- Answer rate
Customer engagement
- Scheduled Appointments
- Number of Transactions
- Conversion Rate
- Average order value
- Customer Requests:
- Appointments, video calls, live chats, SMS
- Information about sessions (duration, cancellations)
- Retailer Referred Shoppers
- Storefronts (recommendations, CTR, Views)
- Unique visitors
- New arrivals CTR
- Top picks
User Engagement
(Sales associate)
- Requests answer rates
- Communications sent (email, video calls, live chats)
- Events created
- Lookbooks created
- Tasks (number of tasks created, completed, resolve time)
- Availability rate
Connect Module
- Click rate
- Number of views
- Desktop versus mobile and tablet usage
This tracking system will ensure a detailed dashboard for managers and head office directors on all clienteling operations from the floor level all the way up to the regional and national level. It will measure the implementation of all the company’s initiatives in terms of customer engagement, customer loyalty, stores’ sales attributed to clienteling activities and more.
Storefronts
With today’s overwhelming number of product choices, many consumers turn to social media influencers and experts for guidance before making a purchase. Digital storefronts bridge the gap between social media and traditional e-commerce experience for consumers, by allowing brands to recreate an engaging, social-media-like experience, but with greater control over product recommendations, keeping customers on their own website rather than directing them to third-party platforms. With many big names such as Macy’s, Saks Fifth, Best Buy, Shein and more using this feature with success, it is predictable that digital Storfronts will continue to grow in popularity in the years to come.
Customer boards
Customer boards are product display web pages specifically built for VIP clients. They work similarly to storefronts, by allowing sales experts to recommend products to shoppers and allow customers to request appointments with a sales associate, chat or send SMS through that web page. But the main difference is that instead of displaying the sales associate’s top picks, it is a platform that caters to the customer’s personal taste or interests. These can act as an easy way to reconnect and recommend seasonal products to already known customers, allowing retailers to boost their engagement and likelihood of repeat purchases for a specific user.
Employee Tasking
Employee task management features are becoming the norm in clienteling, enabling companies to assign and track in-store tasks efficiently. Managers can delegate responsibilities such as handling appointments, making follow-up calls, and more. This improves accountability and helps ensure that important actions: such as notifying a customer about a product arrival or returning a call to a shopper seeking expert advice, are not overlooked. This feature also helps head office directors to oversee in detail how their clienteling operations are concretely being applied in each and every store, thus preventing a disconnect between the perception of the office worker compared to the sales floor reality.
Beyond communication, robust analytics and employee task management features provide retailers with the insights and structure needed to optimize performance at every level, from individual sales associates to national operations. As client expectations continue to evolve, investing in a comprehensive, data-driven clienteling solution isn’t just an advantage, it’s a necessity for staying competitive in the modern retail landscape.
By leveraging these essential features, retailers can enhance customer engagement, improve retention, and drive revenue growth, all while delivering the seamless, high-touch experiences today’s shoppers demand.
If you are interested to see how Salesfloor can help you get a competitive edge by implementing Clienteling solutions to your business strategies, don’t hesitate to book a free 1-1 session with our in-house experts.
