Article for Retail Week, December 2012 - Blog

Article for Retail Week, December 2012

01/02/2012

As is fairly obvious, I don’t need my looks to earn my living, if I did, I’d have been through a CVA sometime ago! However, I do try my best to look after myself.

After receiving it as a Christmas gift, for the past couple of years or so I’ve spent an inordinate amount of money every month on skincare products from Lab Series, yes I’m not ashamed to admit it.

I reconcile this with the fact that I’ve given up lots of bad habits that I spent more money on previously.

For 18 months, John Lewis was the beneficiary of my monthly expenditure. However, I could never understand why I simply couldn’t go into my account and select to buy the same products that I’d previously purchased. Each month I had to add them to my bag again. Although they retained all the rest of my details, it felt a little like starting over as a new customer every month. I grew increasingly frustrated and bored with this to the point that I decided to go direct to Lab Series to buy.

Not only does Lab Series let me re-order with a simple process through my account, they sent me (unprompted) a nice branded dressing gown within a week of my first purchase, and they also gave me a gift with purchase, a cheeky wee Lab Series washbag. So they really are thinking through customer retention and what they can do to secure my loyalty.

I’m also slightly surprised that over the duration of my time as a regular customer of John Lewis, I was never once the recipient of any targeted or personalised emails. You know, something that recognized my behavior, what I bought, how often I bought. All I ever received was the same generic mass broadcast emails that every customer received.

It really would have been quite easy to not only secure my business but to cross sell me onto other related products.

So from this evidence, as big and successful as John Lewis is, they could focus a lot more on customer retention. And they’d do well to remember that a new customer is for life not just for Christmas!