How Sephora uses digital channels to deliver on customer centricity

International cosmetics and beauty retailer Sephora has succeeded in building a wide base of incredibly loyal customers through its focus on multi-channel customer-centricity. The brand, which operates more than 2,600 stores across 30 countries, has been taking steps to implement technology in ways that are useful to customers and complementary to its in-store experience.

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The brand has shown that it understands its customers and is prepared to deliver on what they demand. Sephora’s director of mobile and digital store marketing, Johnna Marcus, describes its customers as people “who have shown historically that they adopt technology where it is useful”.

This supports the core of Sephora’s CX strategy, which revolves around digital innovation with technologies that are useful for its customers, rather than simply implementing what is popular with customers or other cosmetic and beauty brands.

In Sephora’s own words it is “on a mission to give its customers the ability to shop without constraints, anytime, anywhere”.

How Sephora meets more than two million customers through mcommerce

The primary way that Sephora has made life easy for its customers is through its mcommerce (i.e. mobile retail) app. The app was developed after Sephora observed that customers would often use their smartphones when in-store to look for external recommendations, reviews or better prices on the items they were shopping for.

Sephora designed the app to emulate the knowledge of a personal shopping assistant or sales associate. It is designed to provide the required recommendations, reviews and pricing information on a single platform to make life easier for customers.

The beauty retailer has found that by giving customers the tools that they need to make informed purchasing decisions, it has not only been able to encourage more spending from customers but has built a customer base that is incredibly loyal.

As of early 2023, Sephora’s strategy has resulted in five million Facebook fans, 900,000 Twitter followers and 600,000 Apple Passbook registrations. Sephora’s digital users are so invested in the brand that those Apple Passbook users spend twice as much annually and purchase twice as often as the average Sephora customer. On the mcommerce side, its mobile app has more than two million downloads.

How Sephora leverages microservices to deliver agile and nimble customer service

In July 2022, Sephora bolstered its digital strategy with a switch from a traditional, monolithic digital architecture to one based on microservices, through its partnership with commercetools. With a monolithic architecture, all applications and features are connected, meaning that any new implementations or upgrades require businesses to overhaul the entire system to accommodate them. Cloud-native microservices, however, are decoupled, which means they can be launched, upgraded or worked on independently without worrying how they will impact other applications and features.

Such an approach allows Sephora to deliver on its promise for digital excellence much easier than under a monolithic architecture, as it requires less effort and fewer resources to implement new and popular digital features, or react to customer demand for a specific new feature.

Sree Sreedhararaj, chief technology officer at Sephora, said: “At Sephora, we are constantly focused on delivering best-in-class experiences for our clients, both in our stores as well as online, and are dedicated to meeting their ever-evolving wants and needs. The superior technology and [microservice-based] architecture that commercetools provides are not only incredibly reliable, but they allow us to scale quickly and efficiently, ensuring our clients are always getting the digital experience they deserve and have come to expect from Sephora.”

With CX technologies constantly evolving, this level of organizational agility is key as it allows the business to act quickly to capitalize on major customer trends and business needs.

Taking customer service to the next level with rapid delivery

Continuing the experience post-sale, the beauty retailer has demonstrated its commitment to being a leader in the customer service space through a partnership with Shipt, a same-day shopping and delivery company.

As customers today are becoming used to rapid, often same-day deliveries, there is little patience for extended delivery times. In light of this, Sephora’s partnership with Shipt promises to set the retailer apart from much of the competition as it delivers on the demand for speed and convenience.

Carolyn Bojanowski, senior vice-president, general manager of eCommerce at Sephora, said: “For Sephora, this new venture with Shipt marks a thrilling time as we share our commitment to delivering an exceptional client experience in a world where consumer needs are ever-changing. As we continue to cater our offerings to meet our clients’ unique needs, it was important to us to find a partner who not only had the potential to help expand our reach to new-to-Sephora clients, but also support our current clients and new ways of experiencing beauty retail today.”

What makes Sephora’s strategy so successful is that embracing digital innovation is not just about purchasing digital solutions, it is about creating digital environments and experiences that meet customers’ needs and preferences.

Embracing digital innovation means ensuring technologies are useful for and adopted by the customers, not just the brand.