An icon of Belgian fashion for more than 45 years and a partner of Multi-Value for more than 3 years: reasons enough to give the floor to e5. And for that, we couldn’t have found anyone better than e5’s Retail Director, Sévérine Dermaux. Find out below how she uses customer experience visits, training and coaching to provide their customers with a “service beyond expectations”.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and e5?
Sévérine thus. Meanwhile, I have 25 years of experience in the retail world. My career started on the shop floor and eventually progressed to my current position. Through experiences in the world of shoes and bathrooms, I eventually ended up in fashion, at e5 that is.
In my role as Sales Manager, I am responsible for the entire commercial strategy and management of our shops and I am also involved in B2B matters. Of course, I do not do this alone: I am surrounded by a fantastic team that I work with every day.
What do you believe makes e5 unique within the Belgian fashion sector?
I think that is a good question, because it is common knowledge that the fashion sector is struggling today. That is why I am proud that we as e5 can say that we have seen double-digit sales growth for several years now. But what makes us unique? Simple: we want to do everything just a little bit better. We want “a wow everywhere”, as we say ourselves. Hence our cooperation with Multi-Value, by the way.
We want to do better at product level. This is reflected in our ageless collection in various styles and a good price-quality ratio, thanks to the fact that we keep the production fully in our own hands. We also want to do better in terms of customer experience. We recently redesigned all our shops so that customers enter with a ‘wow’ and leave later with a ‘wow’ after exceptional service.
“Our people are more than friendly saleswomen. They are professionals who give you personal style advice and really pamper you.”
We notice that our ambition to do everything better also works: e5 has now been in existence for 45 years and we see that the customers we have attracted over the years remain loyal to us and, moreover, that younger customers also find their way to our shops and come back.
And that ambition then forms the starting point for investment in the e5 CX program?
That is indeed true. When I started at e5, I also visited an e5 shop myself for the first time. I remember being impressed even then by the level of customer service: the staff knew their customers, many of them even by name. We then started a first round of customer experience visits with Multi-Value.
On the one hand, to investigate in general which areas we could improve further. On the other hand, to check whether “the new customers” I mentioned before receive the same top service as those who have visited e5 stores for some time. After all, we want to accompany every customer all the way to the fitting room and style them completely. So that they look in the mirror and say, ‘Wow, I look good!’. That is our intention. It is in that guidance that we still saw growth potential and that is how we started working with Multi-Value.
Why did e5 choose Multi-Value?
I myself already knew Multi-Value from my time at Brantano and afterwards in the bathroom business, in which the cooperation with Multi-Value resulted in clear improvements in results.
It was in that partnership that I got to know Pauline and I can say that Pauline and I understand each other very well now. I think three words are enough for her to know what I mean. Stefaan is also an excellent partner for us as a trainer at e5. He shares my passion for customer experience. Moreover, he is also a really good listener. Not only to strategic plans, but also to our people in the shops. During his training sessions, he therefore speaks a practical language that delivers immediate results.
I noticed that other trainings often remain too theoretical. ‘We are going for a wow’ and ‘service beyond expectations’ sound nice, of course, but it only really means something when it is also given concrete and tangible substance. We build that wow feeling and that service beyond expectations based on the advice from the customer experience visits and the input from Multi-Value itself during sparring sessions and training courses.
What impact has the program had so far?
Of course, we have the NPS. This was being measured before, but it was not really used for anything else. So we shared it with everyone at e5 and set up a workshop to get everyone involved in the “why” and the “purpose” of NPS measurement.
Since I started at e5 three years ago, I saw a significant increase in NPS year-on-year. Looking at the customer experience reports themselves, we also saw a slight increase in scores and particularly in the area of needs analysis. This is due to our approach of continuously sharing, discussing and following up the results of customer experience visits. Let me give an example:
If I express in a clothing shop that I am looking for blue trousers, and the salesperson or saleswoman replies with ‘here are the blue trousers’, the West Fleming in me thinks: ‘Whatever!’ (‘again!’, Ed.). Take a few steps back and ask your customer targeted, open-ended questions: why exactly do you want blue trousers? For what occasion do you want them? Only then one can give appropriate, personalised advice. Our people understand this insight particularly well thanks to the quantified advice Multi-Value gives us. For instance, we see clearly in the results of our customer experience visits that a good needs analysis leads to a higher average purchase amount. In addition, we remain alert for small areas of improvement such as service-oriented extra sales and the goodbye at the checkout. This keeps us on our toes and motivated to keep doing better.
What are the ambitions for 2025?
Continue to focus on what we are already doing: continue with our ageless collections, sustainable quality, our boutique experience, our growth. For us, that growth is not only growth in turnover, but also growth in customer loyalty thanks to our service beyond expectations.
The European fashion industry is challenged by online sales at extremely low prices. How is e5 dealing with this and what is the role of customer experience in this?
Of course, there is a difference in segments. If you are in the cheaper segment, I think you will face a tough battle. Because the well-known online shops will always be cheaper. We at e5 are in the middle segment. Within that middle segment, we focus on that wow experience, high product quality and, last but not least, sustainability. We offer our customers a repair and refurbishment service, which you won’t find with many of our competitors. We bet on those USPs in such a way that the customer thinks: if I need clothes, the first thing I think of is e5. Because there one will find quality at the price one has in mind and, in addition, a service like one won’t find anywhere else.
What advice would you give to other fashion chains?
Make sure you know which customer you want to reach. Listen to that customer and act on what he/she tells you. Also, be close to your customer. At e5, we made a conscious decision to limit the number of shops managed by our district managers. Precisely because we want them to be close to our colleagues on the shop floor in their role. This allows them to optimally fulfil their role as coaches, with Multi-Value’s customer experience reports as a supporting tool.
And what I also think is very important: make sure you have the right people in your shops. People who, like Multi-Value and myself, have the passion for the customer. You actually want people who are happy themselves to see a customer leave with a smile, knowing that he or she will soon return thanks to a service that was even better than the customer expected.
Multi-Value is an important partner for us in this because we use their customer experience reports as a coaching tool. Not to wave a report score, but to help our people grow further in order to do better and better as a company.
One more thing I would like to share. We created our own sales training program based on feedback from Multi-Value’s customer experience reports. We are now building on that with a coach-the-coach program. For this, we will soon be sitting together with Stefaan again, to train the managers in our shops in a practical way as well. That way, also they can get to work in a concrete and optimal way with the feedback from their branch. That is the next step in our cooperation with Multi-Value and I am looking forward to the results.
So did we from our side. Thank you so much for this interview!