Exclusive Q&A: Lands’ End begins omnichannel design with customer

Lands’ End bases its entire customer experience – across all channels – around the current needs and wants of shoppers.

Chain Store Age recently spoke with Sarah Rasmusen, chief customer officer of vertical specialty apparel retailer Lands’ End, about the company’s highly customer-centric approach to providing an omnichannel shopping environment. Rasmusen was honored in Chain Store Age's 2020 Top 10 Women in Tech report.

How does Lands’ End approach mobile commerce?
Our mobile conversion rate is higher than the industry average, which is a huge differentiator for us. This tells us that we have a customer who shows up and is ready to buy. We give our shoppers a terrific digital experience that ensures a smooth transaction – and thus, terrific conversion rates. It’s been a long process of trial and error to get there.

When I got to Lands’ End, mobile penetration was very low compared to the broader retail industry. At the time, our mobile experience was basically a catalog forced into a desktop website, which was then stuffed down to a phone. This wasn’t a great experience for anyone — especially not our core customer. 

Over the last several years, we’ve made a large investment in our mobile experience, knowing that this platform is growing increasingly important to our customers. We’ve paid particularly close attention to customer experience on mobile and have leveraged our customers’ feedback to provide them with a platform that suits their needs. Now, we’re continuing to upgrade our mobile experience by increasing the speed of navigation, checkout and payment options, among others.
 
How did Lands’ End build and evolve its seamless online shopping experience and how has this converted into sales?
A lot of our success as an online retailer can be traced back to our roots as a legacy catalog company. Since we had already been taking orders via catalog for many years, the infrastructure for order management and fulfillment of online orders was largely in place already when we launched our website in 1995 – we just needed a usable front-end for the customer. Traditional brick and mortar companies had a harder time adapting to the web, as they had to build that entire infrastructure from scratch. 

Over time, we’ve evolved our online shopping experience by listening to our customers and providing them with the experience that they want. A lot of this comes from our incredible troves of customer data, which are also the result of our history as a cataloger. We’ve been able to collect rich customer data for nearly 50 years, which has allowed us to keep a close pulse on our customers and has led to excellent retention and rebuy rates.

What type of corporate mentality does Lands’ End follow to help ensure omnichannel success?
Everything we do at Lands’ End revolves around our customer. We’ve been known for our exceptional customer service for more than 50 years, and this really bleeds into everything we do – from our digital presence, to our retail stores, to our plans for continued success.

We do have to be careful. As anyone in retail knows, what the customer says is not always what she does. But – by nature of my role as chief customer officer, and the teams that report to me – we have a very unique model where the voice and actions of the customer literally surround us. Customer care provides a direct voice daily; our research and customer experience teams build trial experiences and evaluate them with our customer in a virtual lab; Testing allows us to push out new features and formats weekly; and analytics helps us balance what the customer says vs. what the math supports. 

The days of ‘we think’ or ‘I believe’ are long behind us, by nature of the massive amounts of data, tools and teams listed above that help create innovation. It is ‘group think’ on behalf of the Lands’ End customer that rules the day and drives our success.