Customers embrace upscale clothing retailer´s high-touch strategy.

The retail environment poses many customer-relationship challenges.

High employee turnover and one-time customers are just two of the hurdles facing retailers trying to implement customer-centric strategies.

Serving an upscale customer base of professional men and women, Mitchells is a million family-owned business with locations in Greenwich and Westport, Conn. (The Greenwich store, acquired in 1995, goes by its original name, Richards.)

The company´s database tracks each of its approximately 150,000 customers´ personal data and preferences, including size and style, as well as SKUs bought and prices paid since the tracking systems were installed in each store.

"I remember meeting one of the country´s top retailers on the runway at an Yves St. Laurent fashion show and he asked me, ´How are your outerwear sales?´" says Mitchell.

"I couldn´t believe he was asking about outerwear sales. My question was, ´How are your upper-end customers buying? Are they very satisfied? Are they coming in more or less frequently?´

He was product focused and I am customer focused. To us, it´s customers first and then the product—of course we search the world for the best product for each customer—and then the rest usually takes care of itself."

This customer focus is a mind-set, he says, from when his parents started the business in Westport in 1958.

Today, there are nine Mitchells in the business, including Jack´s 97-year-old father, who started it all. "Every one of us makes a major contribution," Mitchell says, "and they all have the same mind set; it has been and always will be customers first."

Thirty years of data
In the 1970s, the company began tracking its customers´ purchases by category (suits, shirts, etc.) using an IBM AS 32 and then the AS 34.

The spotlight went on for Mitchell back in 1989, when he and his son Russell purchased the company´s IBM AS 400 and decided to track customers´ purchases, not only by category, but by actual stock keeping unit (SKU).

"When Russell and I were looking at the system, someone from a marketing firm asked us if we knew as much about our customers as we knew about our inventory," he explains. "We realized at that moment that we didn´t...and then the light went on! We decided the whole system would be architected around the customer and then on what the customer bought."

The changing retail scene also showed Mitchell that he was moving in the right direction.

"Two decades ago, people liked to go shopping. They were getting a reasonably decent level of service and they enjoyed it," he says.

"Then the service dried up, and owners didn´t know how to get the customers back. We´ve learned that the most important [assets with regard to building the customer relationship] are the people you have working for you, and their mind-set to serve and help the customers."

That vision flourished and grew when Mitchells acquired Richards. "The most important benefit we bought was the relationship that the sales associates and the tailors had with their customers," Mitchell says.

"They had worked some 45 years establishing those relationships, but didn´t really know who their customers were. Associates were scribbling information down on pieces of paper."

By introducing customized CRM technology, Mitchell was able to take Richards beyond the mom-and-pop stage.

"We brought in a system behind the scenes to track the important customer facts and we gave them the technology to manage customer relations effectively and profitably," he adds.

Today, Mitchells and Richards share a customized customer database built in-house that is completely integrated with their accounting and inventory databases.

Profile...profile...profile
Gathering all that customer data begins with a profiling process in which sales associates ask customers for basic personal information, such as their names and addresses.

According to Mitchell, customers willingly provide the information because the retailer is respectful of its clientele´s privacy concerns.

"When we collect and file customer preferences or any other data customers provide, we are very sensitive to the whole area of privacy," explains Mitchell.

"We never, ever share any privileged customer information with anyone—we don´t sell or rent our customer lists. We´ve even gone so far as to make sure all this information is password protected."

As a result, customers trust the benefits of sharing their information with Mitchells´ sales associates, and go on to provide more personal data about their work and home lives, as well as their clothing preferences.

"Customers aren´t going to tell you their whole history on the first visit. But gradually you listen and you learn about them, and you know how to service them on a one-to-one basis," says Mitchell. "You´ve gone from a transaction to a relationship." (At 1to1 Magazine, we call this process "drip irrigation.")

Enabling employees
As the face to the customer, sales associate buy-in is integral to making Mitchell´s vision of high-touch customer relationships work. To that end, store employees are authorized to "do whatever it takes for customers," he says. "We don´t alter the price, but we´ll do almost anything to service customers and go beyond their expectations."

Informational feedback is key to helping staff members achieve goals. Every morning in their work mailbox, sales associates get a recap of every sale they had the previous day.

Then, about two weeks after each sale, the database prints out a satisfaction report from which associates will call their customers and ask about their shopping experience. But, "It´s not a solicitation call, merely a satisfaction call," Mitchell is quick to point out.

This approach pays numerous dividends for Mitchell´s goal of stocking his customers´ closets. In fact, one of the company´s personalized services is to do just that — go into customers´ homes to clean and organize their closets.

"These men and women are very busy people and their expertise is not clothing. So we provide our advice, and even take pictures of the various clothing combinations that will work for them."

One resulting success story features a customer who lived in Mexico but had a summer place in Greenwich. According to Mitchell, the customer bought her Mitchells salesperson a roundtrip ticket to Mexico City to clean her husband´s closet and stock it with his favorite Brionis. "She loved it, and we were told her husband loved it too," says Mitchell.

Every byte has value
Data is also a key enabler to Mitchells personalized customer-centric approach; therefore, none of the details of its customer relationships is ever discarded.

In Westport, the history goes back to 1989; in Greenwich it goes back to 1996. "We never throw customer data away. We keep product records, for instance, on Polo shirts that we sold five years ago," explains Mitchell. "Maybe we´ll try to reactivate somebody who hasn´t been in for three, four or five years. To do that, we need to know what they bought back then."

A new data report that Mitchell introduced this year, called profiling, highlights many of the key bits of personal information, such as business title, spouse or children´s names, gathered by sales associates.

"For a customer to be profiled, he or she has to have provided us with some personal and professional information," says Mitchell. "For example, in the profile of a customer who´s president of his company, we would see his name, home address, family notes, wife, sons´ and daughters´ names, as well as a daytime phone number, either home or business."

Profile reports are prepared daily to gauge how many customers were profiled, and to provide associates with opportunities to update their customers´ profiles or ask them for more information. The reports have become a management tool for Mitchells to measure its associates´ success.

"In the report for the last two weeks, for example, the average associate profiled 73.4 percent of his customers. Anybody below the average has got to ´go back to school´ and work with me and our managers on how they can improve their profiling abilities," says Mitchell.

"It´s important for all of us to understand that if we know our customers, then we´ll do better for them, and they´ll know they´ll get the personal attention they deserve."

Mitchells employs nearly 200 people—174 full-time and 20 part-time—and Jack Mitchell makes a point of extending his high-touch philosophy to his staff, as well. "I meet frequently with each staff member and always talk to them by their first name." Every staff member also gets a birthday card from the Mitchell family.

Tailoring the marketing effort
In addition to its in-store efforts, Mitchells uses targeted direct mailings and telephone calls to market to different customers differently.

According to Mitchell, the company sends hundreds of individualized mailings each retail season, most of which feature personalized notes from sales associates about favorite brands or designers. Customers who have given their permission may also receive phone calls about designer shows, or recently arrived stock in a favorite brand.

MVCs—customers that spend more than ,000 in any single sale—receive personal notes from Mitchell each year. He also sends a personal note to all first-time customers within three days of their initial visit.

All of these relationship-building efforts, as well as the customer response to those efforts, are stored in Mitchell´s database to track and improve the effectiveness of the company´s varying efforts.

And, although Mitchells collects email addresses, its CEO doesn´t believe that either his customer base—or his associates—are ready for full-scale email marketing.

"We´re going to start experimenting in the near future with some sales associates who are computer literate and will send email to customers who have told us they want to hear from us that way. But we have to go very slowly. The process has to be designed to work extremely well all the time, from the customer´s viewpoint," Mitchell stresses.

Looking ahead
Along with adding email marketing to the current relationship mix, the organization´s future goals include profiling 100 percent of its customer base.

"Every customer that comes in ought to be profiled. And if our associates are forced to get into the computer and put the information there, they will start asking these questions earlier," he explains.

For Mitchell himself, the local buzz around his company´s success from friends, customers and colleagues has prompted him to write a book, which will be published in the spring by Hyperion. The title? "Hug Your Customers."

Karen Burka wrote this article for the 1to1 Magazine's November/December 2002 issue. 1to1.com offers consulting, management, and publishing services to businesses wishing to maximize their relationships with their prospects, customers, and staff.