Solvvy Blog

Nordstrom is not the same company today that it was five years ago. It will be a different company five years from now. That’s how you stay relevant for 117 years.

Ever since it began as a single shoe store in downtown Seattle, Nordstrom has always been about innovation and adaptation, including adjusting to market changes, broadening selections of products and services, expanding geographically, and introducing technology that enhances the customer experience.

While technology is obviously crucial, technology for its own sake is not the primary focus at Nordstrom, where innovation is about solving customers’ needs and enhancing every customer interaction. Nordstrom always asks: “What problem is that technology solving to make life easier for the customer?”

Innovation at Nordstrom is about being “Customer Obsessed and Digitally Enabled”–not the other way around. Geevy Thomas, a veteran Nordstrom executive who is now Chief Innovation Officer, told us, “Customer obsession has been a thread all the way through, but how we deliver against that obsession has changed. Our future is going to allow us to leverage our history but not be held prisoner by it. The customer is at the leading edge, not the technology. We always have to ask ourselves: ‘What does the customer want?'”

Nordstrom has always taken notice of Amazon, whose Seattle headquarters are a few blocks away. Three years after Amazon successfully launched its Web site in July of 1995, Nordstrom launched Nordstrom.com, which today accounts for approximately 25 percent of $15 billion in annual sales.

When it comes to serving the end customer, Nordstrom is channel agnostic. The boundaries between physical stores and Internet shopping are becoming irrelevant. Customers don’t think in terms of a buying channel, but rather the kind of experience they desire at that moment. That’s why Nordstrom has evolved from being a curator of products to being a curator of services and experiences, supported by products.

The physical store is not dead; it’s become digitized, encompassing the personalization and sensory experience of physical brick-and-mortar with the personalization and convenience of digital technology via the customer’s device of choice.

Nordstrom offers salespeople and customers the tools for their smartphones to communicate and make transactions via secure one-to-one texting. Customers can use their smartphone to scan any item, see the price, decide what size and color they want, and then have their purchases delivered to their home, office, or hotel anywhere in North America.

Nordstrom’s online Reserve & Try feature enables a customer to search and discover products and then to quickly go to a nearby Nordstrom store to touch and try on items before buying. This feature enables the customer to best utilize their own time (their most valuable resource) and helps to make the shopping experience easier.

Here’s how it works: The customer shops online, reserves items in their digital closet, fills in their contact information and confirms a reservation in the store closest to them. Users can select up to 10 things, which are held until the store closes the next day. There is no payment up front. Within two hours or less (during store hours), the store texts the customer when the items are available to be tried on.

In the store, the customer visits a designated department called Order Pickup. They find their name on the door of a designated fitting room that contains the previously selected items. They can try on the items, decide what they want to buy and be out of the store in minutes. The customer doesn’t have to talk to a salesperson if they choose not to. If the customer opts to interact with a salesperson, that opens up the possibilities of selling more items to the customer. Reserve & Try combines the convenience of online shopping with the sensory gratification of in-store shopping to create a compelling, seamless customer experience.

By being Customer Obsessed and Digitally Enabled, Nordstrom continually finds ways to innovate and adapt that delight the customer, and motivate employees to enhance the customer experience, create loyalty, and contribute to the bottom line.

Robert Spector, co-author of The Nordstrom Way, recently talked about Nordstrom’s Customer Obsessed Innovation in a Webinar produced by Solvvy. In case you missed it, you can watch the replay here!

Webinar Replay

Employees are loyal when they feel that they are being held accountable, when they are making a meaningful contribution, when their achievements are recognized and rewarded, and when they are afforded opportunities to learn, grow and advance. That’s why Nordstrom views career development as a shared responsibility among managers, employees and the company. It encourages leaders to be the teachers as well as the developers of their people’s growth.

Nordstrom highlights its trust to employees with a single rule: Use good judgment in all situations. Empowerment to do the right thing is the byproduct of trust. Nordstrom gives its people on the sales floor the freedom to make entrepreneurial decisions, and management backs them on those decisions. Everything else flows from that premise.

Customer loyalty is the coin of realm in business. Nordstrom salespeople generate that loyalty by taking ownership of the customer and the customer experience.

Front-line people are empowered to establish relationships with customers and to find ways to take care of them, with a personal touch, as if they were interacting with a trusted friend. A strong connection turns a happy customer into a brand ambassador.

It is axiomatic that people like to do business with people they like. If your product or service is similar to your competitor’s, and the price of your product or service is similar to that of your competitor— Why would you get the business? The answer lies in the relationship you have with your customer and the trust you have built up over time. Once you’ve established and nurtured that relationship, why should your customer go anywhere else?

Trust is embodied in the Nordstrom return policy, which is a virtually unconditional, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee. Empowering the people on the sales floor to accept returned merchandise is the most noticeable illustration of the Nordstrom culture because it is the one that most obviously affects the public.

As counter-intuitive as it may sound, the return policy works to the benefit of the best salespeople, who take back the returns with a smile, knowing that many of those customers will return because they were treated with respect.

Nordstrom is one of only five companies to make Fortune’s “Best Companies to Work For” and the “Most Admired” company every year surveys are conducted.

You can rent employee loyalty, but you can’t buy it. Golden handcuffs are only an effective short-term solution. Many good people will sacrifice a few dollars for a place that values and trusts them.

Each year, all of the new and past winners of the John W. Nordstrom Award (the highest honor for an employee) attend a dinner in Seattle, hosted by the Nordstrom family. The company pays for the travel and lodging for the winners (and their guests)—even for past honorees no longer working for the company. Now that’s loyalty.

Want tips on how to enhance customer experience, develop brand loyalty and increase revenue? Join Robert Spector and Mahesh Ram in a webinar, organized by Solvvy, as they chat about the future of customer service in an omni-channel world while exploring core values that every service culture should consider. Reserve your spot today.

Register Now

Folks from Solvvy – an intelligent self-service platform for customer service – caught up with author, speaker, entrepreneur, and coach, Sarah Hatter to talk everything customer support. For starters, she urges folks to get real. While you would think that “human touch” is getting lost to technology, you might want to think again. Technology, today, is in fact an enabler. A huge proponent of automation and tech, Sarah says, “Artificial intelligence has evolved to a point where it is trained to have an empathetic side.” Isn’t it, then, paradoxical that humans are turning robotic while machines are turning human?

The key takeaway for customer service leaders is that language can be a game-changer: relational is in and mechanical is out. A simple thing like replacing robotic email templates with personal transactional emails might change the way your users perceive you.

Winning customers from that very first experience with your product and company is essential. It is stellar customer service that separates the best from the rest. You want to have your customer service function to be an extension of your persona. If your brand is happy, fun and happening, you don’t want a support notification going out that reads, “Please allow 2-3 days for a response.”

From a “white page with an email address on it” to becoming an “integral function of selling,” customer support has come a long way since Sarah Hatter launched her company, CoSupport, in 2011. The customer support function has truly evolved from playing catch up after product launch to carefully thinking through support strategies ahead of time. Searchable help sections, video tutorials and trained support personnel have become a norm today.

In all of this, what truly amazes Sarah – our wine and grilled-cheese loving friend from California – is support “baked” into the product itself! Instagram is a classic example. It did not have a “Help Center” when it started out and folks took to it almost instantly since it was so self-explanatory. The adoption was phenomenal, and the growth, explosive.

As someone having worked the phones at a call center at the age of 15, Sarah thinks phone support is on its way out! It is expensive and in most cases the staff is not well-educated about the products and services they are supporting. Having untrained interns taking people’s credit cards numbers over phone and paying a crappy wage for reciting a script from the binder is no longer considered effective customer service.

Our expert also shared some interesting research results: Gen Xers tend to contact customer support via email, chat or social while the millennials and the 45+ crowd prefer to find their own answers. Their reasons differ. Millennials “don’t have time to waste” and self-explanatory works best for them while the 45+ age demographic wants to “feel empowered” and leans towards old school user manuals, step-by-step guides and downloadable pdfs.

With web and self-service support on the rise, advent of machine learning and natural language processing, and so many great tools and techniques out there for companies and teams of all sizes – the support community is living in truly magical times. If done right, these technologies can bring great returns on investment and help support driven organizations deliver a stellar customer experience.

Sarah Hatter is going to be sharing her valuable insights on emerging trends and best practices in customer support in a webinar, organized by Solvvy, an intelligent self-service platform for customer service. Reserve your spot today.