Luxury companies are pioneers in customer relations.
They quickly understood that, however unusual the product, it was not enough to convince.
Impeccable service, an immersive experience in the brand’s universe, personal attention: the customer quickly became the focus of all their attention.
An exceptional product for a unique and exceptional customer.
Today, the customer experience has been democratised.
It has taken over marketing, both physical and digital.
How do luxury brands manage to stand out?
How do they maintain their status of excellence in customer relations?
Discover the specificities of customer relations in luxury and how they transpose them into the digital world.
What you can read in this article:
- Luxury customers: a discerning clientele
- Customer experience, the key to an exceptional luxury customer relationship
- Customer relations in the luxury industry in the face of omnichannel strategy
Luxury customers: a discerning clientele
A privileged and unique customer relationship in luxury
Understanding luxury customers is essential to adapting your business strategy. Luxury customers have always had very high expectations.
Luxury is distinguished by an offer of excellent products of exceptional and impeccable quality.
This excellence is reflected in elitist prices 💎
Luxury customers have always had very high expectations of their spending.
They expect a high quality, personalised and responsive luxury customer relationship in which they feel unique and special.
A luxury clientele in search of an experience
In recent years, the luxury consumer base has been enriched by the arrival of new generations 💣
Millennials (born between 1980 and 1995) and Generation Z (born between 1995 and 2010) represent more than half of luxury consumers according to a survey conducted by Klarna.
Among them, the Henrys (High Earners Not Rich Yet) are young people with high incomes, but who have not yet accumulated enough wealth to be called rich.
What is special about these aspirants to luxury? The centrality of digital in their lives and the search for experience.
The new generations are guided, not by the desire to own, but by the desire to have unique experiences 🤩
If they have to choose, many of them will choose luxury hotels over luxury clothing!
Customer experience, the key to an exceptional luxury customer relationship
The customer experience has always been the great strength of luxury houses.
Very early on, under the influence of their Asian clientele, they realised that the buying experience was more important to their customers than the purchase itself.
▷ Discover our use case A creative selling signature programme for a global luxury brand
The boutique, the place to be for a unique and memorable experience
To stand out, luxury brands have never stopped innovating and creating
→ The objective: to surprise, to move, to encourage the purchase.
Geographical location of the shops, decoration, interior design, product presentation, nothing is left to chance.
Everything must reflect the values of the brand, the authenticity and elegance of the products, the exceptional 😍
The shopping experience is lived as a life experience.
The shop is used to script the brand’s imagination.
Luxury brands are increasingly using the codes of retailtainment and storytelling 📖
It’s all about storytelling and entertainment to drive purchase.
Opened in Paris in 2017, the Maison Louis Vuitton illustrates this concept. Customers visit the shop like a museum, discovering works of art and the history of the products, told by an advisor.
→ The objective: to seduce and convince through emotion.
Previews, private concerts, openings, ephemeral spaces, immersive augmented reality experiences, etc. combine to give the customer the feeling of belonging to a special, private, exclusive, inaccessible community.
Luxury experts agree that the real brand experience will always be through retail.
The CRM tools, at the heart of customer relations in the luxury industry
In the luxury sector, personalisation is at the heart of customer relations ❣️
The luxury sector has rapidly taken hold of customer relationship management tools. Customer data quickly gives the advisor a 360° view of the visitor.
With a single click, he can see the history of his purchases, his preferences, the services he is currently using, the list of events he has attended, his online and offline exchanges, etc.
Armed with this information, the advisor has all the cards in hand to offer his visitor a personalised experience that suits him 🍀
He knows which products to direct him towards.
He knows his price negotiation margins.
He can offer complementary tailor-made services such as lending products or sending a piece to the other side of the world.
He can prepare a special welcome by the shop manager or in a separate room.
Customer relations in the luxury sector are maintained after the purchase through personalised exchanges with a dedicated adviser, special offers, exclusive invitations, etc.
▷ Discover our training programme Master the key merchandising concepts
Customer relations in the luxury industry in the face of omnichannel strategy
With the rise of digital marketing, luxury companies have invested in the web 👩💻
The health crisis and containment have accelerated this trend.
The web represents a real challenge for houses that stand out thanks to the exceptional experience their customers have at the point of sale.
How do they manage to transpose the excellence of their luxury customer relations to the web?
Luxury and the challenge of digital differentiation
On the internet, luxury brands face a major challenge.
How to create a unique experience in a digital environment where everything is accessible to everyone?
How to transmit emotion and values through a screen?
How to develop an exceptional customer relationship in the luxury sector at a time when many companies have developed personalised and reactive services?
These questions represent major concerns for luxury companies. Especially as luxury used to lie in the secrecy of home-made recipes, which is opposed to the transparency imposed by social platforms practises.
To differentiate themselves, luxury brands have invested in the world of influencers 📸
If they cannot provide an immediate and memorable experience, they make people dream of a possible exceptional experience.
They use social networks to democratise the emotion of luxury.
It is thanks to online videos that fashion enthusiasts were able to watch their first haute-couture shows live.
▷ Explore the top 10 luxury influencers in France >
The omnichannel revolution for luxury houses
With the arrival of the new generations, luxury companies have reinforced the omnichannel customer journey.
They offer more and more online services, linking the offline and the online: booking items, making appointments, home delivery, online purchase and exchange in the boutique.
They have perfected the customer relationship in the luxury sector and are deploying their experience on the web, respecting the codes of luxury and excellence.
▷ See our training programme “Omnichannel selling”
Offline and online channels are mobilised to unify and streamline the customer experience.
Luxury brands stand out for the performance of their online customer relations.
Reactivity and personalisation are the leitmotiv of exchanges via instant messages on social networks and chatbots.
The Internet is also used to access exceptional offers, private sales or exclusive online events.
→ The aim: for customers to feel as VIP on the web as when they enter a shop. The special bond must be maintained in all circumstances.
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Excellence is the hallmark of luxury.
From the product to the customer relationship in luxury, everything must be perfect. The development of digital tools has turned the codes of marketing on their head.
By trivialising the exceptional, by democratising access to products, one might think that the Internet has called into question what differentiates luxury companies from other brands.
This is not the case.
The world of luxury has perfectly integrated the new codes. The boutique remains the privileged place for a memorable customer experience.
The web is becoming the tool for an increasingly personalised and responsive customer relationship in the luxury sector.
A fine example of the winning – winning complementarity between traditional marketing and digital marketing.
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