Tech Forum: Nordstrom’s CTO on the ‘Closer to You’ Journey and Its Challenges
As Edmond Mesrobian sees it, Nordstrom Inc. has a very ambitious goal.
“We want to make Nordstrom a daily habit,” said Mesrobian, Nordstrom’s chief technology officer, during a conversation with Jim Fallon, editorial director of WWD.
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“The challenge is to keep improving our experience and keep getting closer to our customers. That’s our journey,” Mesrobian said, putting his company’s overarching “Closer to You” agenda into perspective.
“Closer to You has been our company’s ethos of service,” Mesrobian said. “Our goal, to help customers feel good and look great, is at the center.”
The strategy, unveiled in February 2021, is a multiprong program calling out the Seattle-based retailer’s biggest growth opportunities: the Rack off-price chain, digital sales and the market strategy, which involves leveraging the physical assets of Nordstrom’s full-line department stores, Rack and Nordstrom Local to increase services, conveniences and merchandise choices.
“Closer to You has to be everywhere,” Mesrobian said. “That’s our design pattern. Knowing you can start online and end up in a store for a styling opportunity, or in a restaurant and vice versa. Knowing you continues to translate online. Our Rack brand didn’t have buy online, pick up in store, now customers are able to pick up Nordstrom.com orders at the Rack. Essentially, we extended our network. Nordstrom is a wider network. It took time to fully integrate the enterprise so Nordstrom Closer to You transcends all of our brands.”
It’s also a play on words about convenience and connection, Mesrobian said. “Can I get you the product you want, when you want it and how you want it? That’s convenience. The connection part is how I get to know you. How does Nordstrom know me. So that’s the work in front of us. Part of that is through out stylist team and our technologies to help understand and codify what we know about you and reflect that back in our service.”
As Mesrobian told it, within the Closer to You framework, there are a host of challenges, including:
Providing the kind of services offered in Nordstrom stores and serving them up online.
Expanding the customer base.
Providing a wider assortment while not confusing and overwhelming customers with too many choices.
Transforming the loyalty program to be more engaging, and not just transactional and about accumulating points.
Elevating the content offered online.
Scaling the expertise of the Nordstrom stylists.
“Stylists are key from a perspective of helping you look and feel great,” Mesrobian said. “One thing our customers enjoy is getting advice, styling tips. Fashion can be daunting. Stylists are centered toward providing service. How do you bottle that service in the store and provide that same kind of service in a digital form? It is the challenge that all retailers face — how to take the magic of the store and bring that online for full discovery and richness.”
To that end, “data is a prerequisite,” the tech exec emphasized. “Knowing as much about the customer as you can is the first step.”
During the pandemic, “Our stylists embraced technology to help them reach customers when they couldn’t come to the stores,” Mesrobian said. Through remote selling, “They could take styles and style boards and publish them, in a sense, on the larger internet so people got a point of view on fashion.”
On Nordstrom’s approach to technology, “There is not a goal of being an early adopter, for the sake of there being an early adopter,” Mesrobian said. “It has to make sense to create a value with that innovation.” Still, “Our native app is very different from our web experience. You have to think of them as innovation surfaces. Our customers expect it. They expect us to behave like other consumer brands.”
“The world is going to see an explosion of different facets of augmented and virtual reality. We are seeing pilots of it now. There are flares, metaphorically that are out there,” Mesrobian said.
With building the assortment, “One of our goals is to provide the best brands the world has and the widest selection to our customers,” Mesrobian said. “You can’t fit that all in one store. You have to be careful that when you have millions of choices, how do you reduce that down to the 10 that really resonate. That is the big challenge that all e-commerce sites face. There is an explosion of choices. If you shop some of the well-known retailers, it’s a list after list after list. That is not the experience you get in the store. You have to expand the selection to offer the assortment that customers expect but reduce that assortment to an attractive size that customers can navigate.”
Information gathered from customers through questionnaires, style quizzes and purchase histories inform the assortments. “It’s not one trick. It’s as much information as you can get and then use that to serve the customer. You have take the information, figure how can we best use that when you are in the store or online,” Mesrobian said.
Reflecting on shaping the loyalty program, Mesrobian said, “The challenge is the world is moving from being transactional to one of engagement.” It’s not just about getting points for purchase, he suggested. “Loyalty is a vehicle for experience — invitations to a party, a fashion show, early access to fashion — not just transactions. That’s on our journey toward engagement as our North Star.
“Most of our customers are always online, always on our app. They are trying to just learn and discover. In our case, we always want to make sure we can give the customer a rich experience of information, so they come many times to learn about a fashion trend, about what’s happening, as opposed to twice a year when they may want to shop or whatever the number might be. The question becomes what content is relevant.”
On Nordstrom’s website and app, there are product videos with stylists and associates, models, content provided by brands, and there possibly even be content created by Nordstrom that involves customers, Mesrobian said. “Show us your closet. Gives us your opinion of a fashion outfit that resonates. Let’s share that with our community. There are many forms of content that we can offer. There is a long road in front of us on content. We are in the first or second phase at best.”
“If you think of content analogous to product choices, content becomes a challenging problem. On the internet, there is no shortage of information. To bring the content that is relevant to you is also challenging. The last thing we want to do is overload the customer,” Mesrobian said. “We want Nordstrom to be a daily habit and make content a part of that daily habit.”
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