Fine-Tuning UNIQLO's Customer Experience: From Good to Great

UNIQLO’s parent company, Fast Retailing Co., just reported an 11% bump in profits this past quarter AND announced that they’ve begun the process of opening another 11 stores in the U.S. to continue their expansion overseas. It’s majorly impressive how smoothly Uniqlo has adapted to the overseas market — global expansion is a task most brands tend to struggle with.

And while their products are great, their product line isn’t necessarily the main reason for their success. The truth is — UNIQLO does a fantastic job of utilizing data to fuel its customer experience strategy — so much so that it’s allowed them to connect their physical and digital touch points in a seamless way. BUT there’s always room to improve, and here’s how.

Collecting Feedback

If you want proof of UNIQLO’s top tier customer experience strategy, it’s in their numbers. In 2023, they collected opinions from over 1.1 million customers using post-purchase surveys, revealing a customer satisfaction level of 88%. When you compare that to the average customer satisfaction percentage in the retail industry of 82%, UNIQLO is a clear winner in this category.

Currently, these comments are shared throughout the firm to the relevant departments weekly and analyzed primarily by customer centers. With over 1 million opinions to sort through annually, it can be a costly endeavor. But nowadays, there are tools that have the power to streamline a manual process like this. For instance, here’s how Cotera could make a difference.

Implement a customer insight tracker

Not only would Cotera’s customer insight tracker have the ability to analyze customer reviews, but also social media comments, customer support tickets, and any other source of feedback. Each piece of feedback is then categorized by emotion, category, and topic, making it a breeze to look at all these sources at once, aggregate the data, and see exactly what customers love or hate about just one product or even the whole brand.

Digitizing Touch Points

UNIQLO proudly utilizes an online-to-offline strategy that allows them to collect all kinds of data — including impressions, clicks, app downloads, page-views, and add to carts — and pair these pieces of data to individual customer profiles. A good chunk of this data is gathered from their app and website, which act as a hub connecting the physical customer experience with the digital.

Members have access to exclusive deals, “online-only” designs or sizes, and more flexibility in the way they shop. App users have the option to make their purchases online for the sake of convenience, but on occasion, UNIQLO has also offered a monetary incentive to shoppers who lock in their purchases in-store. However, UNIQLO remains a brand that generates the majority of sales from their physical stores — only around 15-20% of purchases were made online in 2023. But again, there are tons of ways to unlock revenue opportunities here. Here’s another way Cotera could help.

Improve product recommendations

UNIQLO already collects tons of data on every customer, whether that be clicks, purchases, browsing behavior, etc. This is useful for figuring out not only what one customer likes, but also all other customers who make similar purchases or browse similar products. Cotera does this for you by directly using individual customer data to make predictions about similar customers. And if UNIQLO can use this to make more accurate product recommendations, they can drive greater AOV both online and in stores.

Create customized incentives

Like many brands, UNIQLO’s members get special access to deals and promotions on a daily basis. What if they could optimize these incentives to their own advantage? UNIQLO already knows every one of their customers’ AOV, purchasing patterns, and priorities. A tool like Cotera automatically analyzes this kind of information to come up with different promotions (ex. spend $50, get $5 off VS spend $100, get free shipping) that will drive maximum value out of each customer while still getting people excited about a deal.

Takeaway

Even the best of the best have areas in their CX strategies or customer journeys that can be much improved with a little help. And like we see here, it’s not about completely changing the way something is done — it’s about improving it.

‍