Until recently, I’ve never shopped gap.com, but Gap’s new CEO Art Peck gets me. He understands the role of digital in today’s omni-channel world, hence the company’s decision to create an executive role focused on customer experience. His retail 3.0 push is exactly what got me to shop online, not once but twice in the last 3 weeks.
Gap’s customer-first approach does what all retailers need to do:
- Deliver a seamless experience across channels
- Anticipate customer needs
Personally, I hate going to stores but love shopping online. So here’s how Gap made me a fan again and got back into my closet:
- Relevant upsells: Like a personal stylist, their recommendations actually made sense.
- Guest checkout: I heart you for making the checkout process effortless.
- Clear and concise language: Please, no internal company speak or generic marketing lingo.
- Complete visibility of the cart process: Condensed and collapsed on one page makes the process easy to navigate.
- Clearly displayed cart items: Throughout my checkout – yes! (But honestly, do users really need the SKU?)
- Customer control: Being able to make changes at any time during the checkout flow without going back to step one was wonderful – thank you.
- Magically auto-populated fields: Made me smile, even though the form looked daunting. Only showing the fields needed would help and then letting the magical auto-populating information display.
- The connected bag: A nice and convenient touch across platforms. In the future, spanning multiple channels with this approach would make the purchase even easier. Buy online and pick up in-store is a favorite of mine.
- Timely updates: The triggered confirmation and shipping emails were well timed and helpful, and then my expectations were exceeded with the items arriving sooner.
- Promised GapCash: Arrived via email and I could easily redeem them online or in-store unlike other retailers who purposefully make the redemption process cumbersome. (You know who you are!)
- Social proof: And then, shortly after receiving my items, my shopping journey was completed with a well-executed request for me to review my new purchases. Well played.
As a first-time shopper at gap.com (after many years of avoiding the brand) the desktop, tablet and mobile experience felt seamless and even the store seemed to reinforce that Gap was on the right track to earning my loyalty. But like every company, Gap still has work to do. The reserve-in-store function looked inviting and I was interested in trying it but everything was unavailable, making me wonder if it actually worked.
And then when I visited a store, a sales clerk told me the in-store lookup wasn’t always right and it’s better to call. So maybe I do need the SKU after all?
Has a major retailer recently won your heart with their stellar customer experience? Let us know in the comments below.
