5 minutes with Clarins: Digital experience trends, prepping for peak and the power of DXA

CX Circle NYC was all about sharing advice, inspiration and predictions for this new era of digital experience. During the event, Clarins’ Director of eCommerce, Edouard Madec chatted with us about the biggest digital experience trends for 2024, tips for preparing for peak season and leveraging DXA tools to better the customer experience.

Q: What do you think the biggest digital experience trends will be for 2024?

Generative AI and the applications it can have across businesses. AI is in its infancy and still pretty primitive regarding UX. But in the future, it will transform our business with guided selling and education.

With guided selling, AI could help customers choose their products. For example, if a customer wants a makeup look for a wedding, AI can provide personalized recommendations based on the details they share, similar to what they’d experience in-store.

For education, when customers buy a product, AI can help them learn how to use it. The customer experience doesn’t end with conversion, so this additional education can help increase customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.

Q: What are Clarins’ priorities for building seamless omnichannel experiences in 2024?

The eCommerce industry has been talking about mobile-first for a while, but there is still a difference between the principle of mobile-first design and the reality of it actually being implemented by businesses.

To build seamless omnichannel experiences, it’s important to know why customers use each device—what are the intent and goals? For example, often on mobile, our traffic is from ‘window shoppers’ or people who are just coming to browse and get more information.

With DXA tools like Contentsquare, we can understand this behavior and make sense of our conversion rate discrepancies between mobile and desktop. This allows us to optimize our mobile experience to cater to these potential customers and ‘window shoppers.’

Q: What’s your priority as you prepare for the peak holiday shopping season?

Understanding and analyzing our customer journeys so we can make any optimizations ahead of time. We ensure our brand is consistent between journey stages and channels so every touch point reflects our holiday campaign and visuals.

Additionally, we’re working with our operations team to ensure everyone is ready for the increased volume during Black Friday/ Cyber Monday. It’s not only important that customers have an amazing digital experience, but they also get their orders delivered to them quickly, and it’s up to par with our brand standards and their customer expectations.

Q: What’s one optimization you’ve made with DXA to your site that produced major success?

At Clarins, we’re constantly looking at different areas of the website where we can make optimizations based on where the data points to friction to better the experience.

One of the tests we did this year was regarding search. We started to notice that there was some friction because users had to type their search and then get directed to the results page. And we can’t always control what that page and experience looks like. So, we rolled out a new experience that surfaces search terms and products through the search bar before a user starts typing. That small change has greatly improved our conversion rates in sessions with search.

Q: What do you think brands need to do to build and maintain trust with prospects?

Ensure data privacy. For me, it really comes down to respect for your customers and understanding their level of comfort with the data they’re sharing with you as a brand. Different people have different thresholds for what they want you to do with their data. So, it’s important to be as transparent as possible.

We’re always challenging ourselves to ensure that we’re delivering value to consumers based on the data they share with us and that it’s providing them with meaningful, personalized experiences. If done wrong, consumers can feel like they’re being bombarded with messaging that may or may not resonate with them, leading to lower satisfaction and a negative brand experience.

Listen to your customers’ signals regarding what they are okay with you doing with their data. That’s the best way to build and maintain digital trust.

Bonus Q: What CX tips can you offer other retailers?

Focus on understanding your customer journeys and analyzing them with empathy. Really put yourself in their shoes and explore your channels from their perspective. It sounds simple, but it’s one of the best ways to ensure your journeys are efficient and frictionless and that your branding is consistent throughout.

Take time to dive deep into your journeys, identify fiction points and optimize accordingly.

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