How The North Face is Using a Strong Data-Based Foundation to Create the Best Customer Experience, with Sarah Kleinman,Vice President of Digital Experience

The customer should always be the guiding light for a brand. Who is your customer? What do they need? What do they want? Where do they live? How do they behave? These are all absolutely critical pieces of information upon which your entire business should be built. That’s Sarah Kleinman’s philosophy at least. Sarah is the Vice President of Digital Experience at The North Face, where she is constantly working to gather information about, understand, and then create experiences for North Face customers. 

On this episode of Up Next in Commerce, Sarah guided me through how she thinks about creating an effective digital experience, and she explains the foundational elements that every brand should be using to ensure that they are set up for the present and can still build in the future. She talked about integration, enablement, loyalty programs, testing, why companies should be paring down their offerings, and so much more. This was a jam-packed episode, so I hope you love it! 

Main Takeaways:

Integration, Integration, Integration: The success of your ecosystem is dependent on the connectivity of your tools. It’s not enough to build and launch a tool, app, or system, it has to be intertwined with your entire digital ecosystem in order to gather real-time data and create an easy flow for customers.The Honest Truth: It is critical to create an honest segmentation of your customer base, because that is the base upon which everything else can be built. When you know what your customers actually care about, you can create the right products for them, the right marketing and digital content for them, and build out experiences that truly engage them.Back To Basics: People are tired of gimmicks and they want less, more versatile stuff. As such, brands should have a goal to shrink their product offerings and focus more on the value they are bringing to consumers with the most quality, sustainable, versatile products.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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For a full transcript of this interview, click here.