Aldo uses Salesforce to drive ‘customer delight’

Canadian luxury shoe retail brand Aldo operates globally and omni-channel, but has only recently begun using data to create a single view of its customers across all channels, improving the brand’s ability to create a good customer experience.

Erwin Hinteregger, Aldo’s chief marketing officer, explains at NRF Big Show 2017 that the retailer was founded in 1972 with the aim of becoming a “people company” focused on creating “love, respect and integrity” for its customers and staff.

He says it is not enough today just to have a “good culture” and adds: “We are not just a retailer any more.”

As a global enterprise that is more than 40 years old, Aldo has had to adapt to the growth of technology in the retail space, not just by going omni-channel but by offering a personalised customer experience too.

With 2,000 stores across 100 countries, online sites servicing many regions, contact centres and mobile sites, there are many touchpoints for consumers to interact with the brand.

The company has three brands, of which Aldo is the best known, and at the core of its value system is the desire to create “customer delight” through interactions with its brands.

In a bid to “truly understand the customer”, Aldo began using Salesforce to interpret its customer data to drive a more seamless, personalised customer experience.

The Aldo group implemented Salesforce Service Cloud to move its customer data to a single platform, and then used Salesforce Marketing Cloud to target customers as individuals during marketing campaigns.

As consumers become more demanding and fickle, Hinteregger says the shift towards omni-channel was also a move away from acting solely as a retailer towards acting as a brand.

“If you look back at the last 40 years or even the last five years, the retail space has changed,” he says. “There was a big change within the company to shift from a retailer to a brand-first organisation.”

The brand wants to offer coherence and consistency across all its channels, he says, as well as create “memorable moments” that keep customers coming back.

The idea of a single customer view was originally implemented in the retailer’s call centres. Now Aldo stores have beacons that sense when a customer is nearby, and invite them to look at an item already viewed on their personal devices.

Consumers can also make appointments online to go into a store and try products out, enabling stores to ensure they have what the customer wants.

“We know that a customer is actually in the store because there is a beacon that identifies the customer,” says Hinteregger.

Stores also know which items customers have selected to try on, and in the future, Aldo aims to use Salesforce to break down data silos within the organisation to get a clearer view of customer journeys.

“What keeps me up at night is continually enhancing customer delight,” says Hinteregger.