Long before the rise of ecommerce and online customer support, clienteling was the primary way brands and retailers ensured customer satisfaction, especially in the luxury retail market. In particular, clienteling was used as a strategy to increase sales among the most loyal of customers.

Clienteling, by definition, is a technique employed by salespeople to cater their services and product recommendations based on what they know about each customer. To successfully clientele, salespeople gather data about previous interactions and customers’ buying behavior and use that data to form a long-term relationship that also results in increased lifetime value.

While digital marketing often focuses on customer acquisition, clienteling is designed to retain customers and increase loyalty by using the data previously collected to create personalized shopping experiences for those customers.

Clienteling is a type of sales strategy. Clienteling apps are software platforms that make it easier and more efficient for your sales team to clientele on a grand scale.

A clienteling app is meant to streamline retailers' outreach by offering advanced features that remove a lot of the manual tasks associated with clienteling; for example, a clienteling app like Endear can help you identify which customers to contact by keeping their purchase history updated in real time.

Before the advent of the apps, getting to know customers and understanding how best to meet their needs was done through more analog resources, such as shopping logs and phone calls.

But with a clienteling app, salespeople can easily keep up with clients' buying behavior, their transactional history, and more. Retail outlets then use this information to engage with customers over remote channels rather than having to rely on customers walking into the store.

A good clienteling app should detect hidden audiences, provide efficient methods of outreach, seamless remote shopping, transparent performance data, and cross-store organization.

A clienteling app should help both the retailer and customer achieve their goals. Here are some key features to consider as you explore the market:

• No clienteling app is worth using if it can’t sync data into your system in real time. Expecting users to manually keep up information about your customers and their activity will result in an incomplete picture of who those customers are. Learn about the integrations that make this sync possible in Endear.
• Your clienteling app should keep inventory updated and help you avoid recommending products that are not in stock.
• Your app should enable dynamic messaging that allows for each recipient to receive a message tailored to their unique profile.
• Your app should encourage two-way conversation. A good clienteling app will let customers chat with your sales team over any channel that suits them.
• A good clienteling app will allow teams to coordinate their outreach so that no one reaches out to the same person
• The app you choose should provide accurate insights on how your clienteling strategy is paying off

Let's look at some examples of the most popular Clienteling Apps on Shopify.