Top takeaways from our customer experience discussion with JCPenney’s chief customer officer

We know that everyone was able to catch our discussion with JCPenney’s chief customer officer Katie Mullen, right? Right???

If you didn’t, you should check it out, but we’re going to highlight some of the key takeaways from our talk about the online customer experience. Mullen, who previously served as Neiman Marcus’s chief digital officer, joined JCPenney in January 2022 under the same title.

Mullen’s title change to chief customer officer earlier this year underscores JCPenney’s commitment to shaping its customer experience into a holistic vision that incorporates the digital and physical spaces.

It’s personal: Personalization is one of the key components in creating a valuable customer experience. Mullen emphasized; however, that personalization cannot be purely algorithmic because savvy consumers can sniff that out pretty easily.

• This entails understanding that a shopper that has bought a black T-shirt might be outfitting and looking for a bottom to complement it. Or, if a customer is browsing jewelry, offering them information on different cuts of diamonds, while also keeping their budget and timing in mind.

“if we’re running in a very channel-siloed world, you really can’t pull together and understand that the customer who didn’t convert in an online experience today may still be a customer who’s very actively in the market, but just needed a different type of engagement for that next step in in their path to purchase,” she said.

Crunch the numbers: Despite not wanting to make the customer journey purely algorithmic, algorithms, data, and analytics are still extremely valuable. Mullen said over the last 18 months, JCPenney has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in building out its omnichannel and data leveraging capabilities.

• Mullen, whose focus is data and analytics, said JCPenney closely examines net promoter scores (NPSs) to get an assessment on how deeply engaged customers are with the shopping experience.
• But NPSs alone don’t tell the whole story. Mullen said they pair that with what she called graduating customers, or assessing whether shoppers are moving from initial exploratory, browsing behaviors to deeper behaviors that include shopping the range of the company’s offerings.

“We look at graduation by different types of behaviors—store-only customers, digital-only customers, omni customers—and it really helps us identify where are the opportunities that we have to refine our customer experience,” Mullen said.