It's remarkable how the women my life really like shopping at the different Chico's FAS stores. I think a big reason is that somehow they manage to deliver a boutique experience for every customer at all their stores.  That's not an easy feat when you run over 1,000 stores nationwide under 4 different brands: Chico's, White House | Black Market, Soma Intimates and Boston Proper. 

Chico's operates with a catchy tagline of "helping women look as great as they feel." What drives their ability to deliver on that promise is a laser focus on the customer experience based on a structured approach to marketing analytics.  We captured those details in a recent webinar and what emerged are the ten steps that drive how Chico's offers personalized retailing on a national level:

1. Consolidate the data:  If organizational or data siloes are irrelevant to the customer, try to remove them because they'll just get in your way. A key first step for Chico’s was bringing together all of its key customer data to effectively mine, segment, cross-sell and prospect across brick-and-mortar storefronts, catalogs and websites for multiple brands.
2. Segment accurately across channels: Once your data is consolidated, aim for relevance with each customer. Marketing analytics can help you achieve relevance by allowing you to develop better segments that enable improved targeting.
3. Predict confidently: The results from combining marketing analytics with your own institutional knowledge of your customers will instill confidence in your ability to predict outcomes - making your strategy proactive and not reacive. Chico's tripled their results in winning back lapsed customers with applied marketing analytics.
4. Make it worthwhile for your customers: Get your customers to willingly share their profiles and other data with you with a robust loyalty program that the customers value. You'll get more details that are more accurate when they're incented to help you keep it real.
5. Capture and integrate online behavior data: If your data draws from all the places where your customers live, breathe and shop, then your analytics will yield insights that reflect the whole profile of your customers. And we all know how much of our lives are lived and shared online.
6. Look at the data in multiple ways: Get a richer, more complete picture by running multiple models to address different issues and considering how the different outcomes may compliment each other. The linkages you make can extend the value of the analytics in unexpected ways.
7. Cluster for conclusions: Chico's compared clusters of outside data and inside data on share of wallet and found out that location plays a surprisingly large role in the way customers spend money and what kind of merchandise they buy. Your data may have other hidden opportunities for insight.
8. Get the communications right: It's never been more important to send the right messages to the right people at the right time and with the right frequency. That alone can deliver a competitive advantage with customers that are busy as ever and inundated with messages. Bug them in a way they're not open to (or with irrelevant offers) and you'll erode the way they regard you.
9. Align operations with the single customer view: It's all about keeping the customer at the center of all of your organization's touchpoints with them. Chico’s now views the supply chain through this same prism and tries to "get the right merchandise for the right customer at the right place and at the right time."
10. Forge a partnership with IT: At Chico's, the CRM team speaks business on the technology side, and the business side definitely is data savvy and has their hands on their data. Having those viewpoints on each side and working together enables everyone a seat at the table during the strategic discussions.