Learn how 4 digital leaders create unique, full-funnel customer experiences

Anand Lal: Check, check.

Director: What are you thinking about when it comes to customer experience?

Ernie Garcia: Our mission is to change the way people buy cars. That sounds like a pretty concise, relatively simple mission, but it’s very hard to do that.

Lori Coulter: Consumers’ values around discovery, how she’s finding brands, experiencing new products, really has all moved digital, and in that short amount of time, we’ve seen an incredible amount of change.

Reshma Chattaram Chamberlin: Maintaining a great customer experience when adapting to significant change is not easy, but for us it always starts with our customer — asking her what she wants and when she wants it, as opposed to assuming we know what she wants.

Lal: An evergreen challenge for Grainger is, how do we present solutions to customers that are relevant to them? It’s widely important for us to get to the right customers, the right people, at the right time, and with the right messages, and do it all at scale.

Garcia: The No. 1 reason it was always given why cars couldn’t be sold online was that people needed a test drive. We said, “Is there a way for us to use technology to let a customer take themselves through the whole experience?” So, we said, “OK, well, is there a way that we can merchandise the car in a different way, where they can experience online and get as good a feel for what that car’s about as they would have gotten in person?”

Coulter: So if you think about the history of retail, curation was always happening by the merchant. You would discover new brands in-store. And what’s happening now is really the consumer is telling brands digitally what, where, and why she wants to buy a brand.

Chattaram Chamberlin: It’s important for any retailer to have a data-driven approach, because when we have more data, we can do better for our customer.

Lal: At Grainger, we offer almost 2 million products and multiple services to, pretty much, businesses in any industry you can think of. For us, what has been really effective is a combination of automation and testing. Firstly, we want to get our channel mix right, and we want to optimize those channels. But importantly, we also want to have a very good sense of, what is the value being created by any and every dollar we spend?

Given the scale of the customers we have to reach, given the diverse customers we have, and the products we have to connect them with, automation is really the only way for us to be able to do that.

Chattaram Chamberlin: Test and learn is at the DNA of Summersalt. So it’s all about thoughtful tests when it comes to marketing initiatives, product development, and anything in between. We’re really giving the test the ability to succeed, and then using that data to make more thoughtful, informed decisions in the future.

Garcia: When you’re trying to build something new for customers, I think the first thing that you have to do is, you have to build a system that is actually better for them.

Lal: Bringing in the capabilities and the platform that a company like Google offers, but then really adding to that the proprietary data and our understanding of our business and our customers together, creates a great partnership.

Chattaram Chamberlin: Well, we think about all our partners as critical to our journey and meeting our customer where she is.

Coulter: And when we think about Summersalt’s overall brand campaigns, we know that those initiatives often result in Google searches, Google shopping finds, and on YouTube. And so from that perspective, making sure it’s an integrated campaign at all times is absolutely critical.

Garcia: Finding big partners that have these funnels, where we can go get our message in front of customers and find creative ways to explain where we’re different, is a huge part of our success.

Coulter: Consumer behavior has changed forever, and it’s our job to really deliver what the consumer is looking for.

Garcia: Our goal is to generate a memory for customers that marks that milestone of getting that car that they remember. That’s an important moment, and we want to be part of it.

Chattaram Chamberlin: When we think about the swimwear and apparel industry, it had been incredibly fragmented. So it’s at the foundation of our business model to create a more joyful, seamless, exciting experience for our customer in an industry that was devoid of that connection.

Lal: We are at a point where marketing is recognized as a growth driver. It’s really tremendous.

Chattaram Chamberlin: And that’s what makes it so special. We are so excited to represent our customer through our marketing initiatives.

Garcia: And those customer experiences can’t just be a little better than what customers get elsewhere. They have to be a lot better, and they have to always be getting better. And so that’s what we work on every day.

Director: I think that’s it. I think we got.

Garcia: Cool.