Tailoring Customer Experience: Savile Row’s Lessons for Success
Unlock customer success secrets from Savile Row tailors: Personalized craftsmanship & high-touch service. Elevate your strategy!
As you all know by now, knowledge and best practices about customer experience can come from different, sometimes unexpected places. Today, I want to bring your attention to the world of luxury fashion, most precisely to a hallowed street in London’s Mayfair district known as Savile Row.
Savile Row is known for being the place of bespoke tailoring. But that doesn’t give full credit to a place that elevated tailoring to an art form. But besides premium materials and accessories that promote Savile Row’s suit to cost a small fortune, we can learn many valuable lessons about the process full of unforgettable ‘wow’ moment that drives experience and builds long-standing loyalty between tailors and their customers.
Lesson 1: Personalization is Key
80% of customers gradually gained loyalty for a brand over time due to experiences with excellent products, services, reviews, advice, etc.
Central to the art of Savile Row tailoring lies the crucial principle of customisation. Upon setting foot in the store of a Savile Row tailor, clients embark on an immersive and collaborative journey. The tailor takes the time to ascertain the client’s preferences, needs, and unique specifications. This initial consultation serves as the cornerstone for an utterly bespoke experience.
Tailors often use paper patterns to make further orders and changes, which they store in-house. The patterns may change over time or even during the same order, but this level of personalisation and attention to detail sets extraordinary tailors apart from common ones.
Lesson 2: Understanding the Customer’s Needs
“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realise it themselves.”
When it comes to the art of custom tailoring, merely taking measurements from a client is not enough to truly grasp their unique requirements. The Master Tailors of Savile Row understand this and go above and beyond by engaging in personal conversations with their clients. By establishing a deeper connection, they gain a profound understanding of their clients’ fashion preferences and personality traits. This knowledge allows them to create bespoke suits that fit flawlessly and accurately reflect their client’s individuality.
Lesson 3: Building Relationships
“It comes down to how your customer experiences the brand — and how that brand makes a person feel.”
Lastly, an essential part of success embraced by Mayfair’s craftsman is building solid relationships built on trust and understanding. Clients are in constant contact with the tailor to consult every change or inspiration resulting in their garment. During the whole process, there are multiple visits to measure every fine detail. Sometimes, the measurement taken at the beginning may slightly (or less slightly 🙂) change, and the tailor has to accommodate that.
While the most critical decision about the colour or type of the fabric won’t change, everything else is the result of the process, which at its core has a strong relationship built before, during and after all those countless sessions.
The same is true for Customer success managers — who need to go above and beyond to cultivate solid relationships with their customers beyond simple business transactions. These connections must be built on trust, compassion, and a genuine desire to meet the customer’s needs. Only by dedicating oneself to these principles can one hope to truly excel in this role.
High-touch at its finest
60% of customers say they trust the reviews that come from friends, family, and other customers
After analysing the three lessons, it is clear that Savile Row tailors follow a high-touch model similar to what we see in the SaaS industry. This model places great emphasis on personalisation, prioritises building solid relationships with customers, and makes understanding their needs a top priority. These are also the fundamental principles that successful customer success managers follow when working in a high-touch model.
This commitment to making a ‘bespoke’ experience for every customer ensures that every detail is perfect and the customer’s expectations are exceeded.
Wrap-up
58% Of Customers Will Pay More For Better Customer Service
Whenever you decide to make yourself a gift and treat yourself with a bespoke garment created by some of the most skilful tailors, the very first thing would be a warm welcome to make you feel special. This is the moment to start building a relationship with your customer.
Then, it’s time to understand customer needs in the form of an initial consultation, measurements and styling guides. They will choose the fabric and all the details. It’s the fundamental moment to understand customers better, why they want to buy a suit, when and where they will use it, and what they want to express by it. All of those are important to personalise the product to the highest echelon.
After that, the process is “simple”: pattern creation, chalk outlines, basting and first fitting, adjustments, pattern updates, and more fitting, more adjustments, more updates…
When it comes to customer success and management, Savile Row tailors can teach us valuable lessons. Creating exceptional customer experiences involves personalisation, understanding customer needs, and building solid relationships.
So, let’s draw inspiration from the tailors of Savile Row and tailor our customer experiences with the same simple goal:
Perfection and ultimate satisfaction of the client.
Follow us on:
This article was originally published on our website: cxperiencelab.com
If you want to learn about building lasting customer relationships, read the article below.
