Imagine you are at a restaurant. You’ve heard from a friend that the food is excellent, and want to try it out yourself. Having booked in advance, you turn up and experience your first disappointment: the place looks like it was decorated by a colour-blind snooker player. No matter, you made your booking and you persevere. Your booking specifically requested a table by the window, but your grumpy waiter doesn’t take that into account and you spend the evening shifting slightly to make way for people coming to and from the loo. The menu is unclear. Your order takes forty minutes. Finally, the food is there and your friend turns out to have been correct: yes, it is very possibly the tastiest meal you’ve had in months. You get overcharged on your bill, make a complaint, pay and leave. You’ll probably not return.
However good a product is, it won’t make a difference if the delivery and the customer experience sucked. A beauty brand operates differently to a restaurant, and you definitely can’t get away with poor customer experience and still get paid, only bearing the brunt of a non-existent tip. If your customer doesn’t like how you’re selling, they’ll go elsewhere. In-store, there are probably a number of other concession stands they can approach instead. Online, they have the entire world at their fingertips. If they don’t like your presentation, if your products aren’t easy to find and access, if it’s not clear how the product will suit their needs, they’ll go elsewhere.
Beauty personalisation technology is a perfect way of investing in user experience because it:
Strengthens existing behaviours: You don’t have to revolutionise every step of the beauty shopping experience and, to a certain extent, many customers wouldn’t like it if you did, but beauty personalisation can strengthen existing systems and behaviours. This includes simply making it easier to navigate a beauty brand or retailer’s website, as well as giving sales assistants in-store the tools to improve their experience with the customer.
Respectfully uses data: Data is currently an obsession, for the consumer, for businesses and also for the media. Beauty personalisation enhances the user experience by actively showing the customer what their data is being used for, safe in the knowledge that the data is making life easier for them. Beauty personalisation also means that customer data, is being used to make communications more personal and relevant, and that won’t be considered a bad thing.
Is consistent between store and digital: The in-store experience is still a very important part of the customer and user experience, and shouldn’t be abandoned to make way for new technology. Real-life experience and service is of high importance, where beauty retailers and beauty brands should offer a transition between the two that puts the customer front and centre. This is in addition to maintaining a transition that is seamless and easy.
If you would like help with improving the customer experience, we are happy to provide a demo, showing how Beauty Matching Engine can do this for you.