In general, customer service is a blanket term for all support you provide to customers regarding their purchase activity, such as item delivery and returns. Customer service teams are not typically responsible for advising on what products a customer should buy. Clienteling, however, is a part of the sales experience, focused entirely on building relationships and increasing lifetime value using things like personalization, data, and loyalty-building. We dive deeper into the key differences in our article here.

Clienteling software can be defined as any application or platform that houses all of your customer information in one place to make it easy for your retail associates to clientele. Clienteling software like Endear also allows you to automate such clienteling practices as sending emails and texts, building audience segments, and tracking how outreach converts into sales.

Besides the core retail skills we think all sales associates need to deliver expert clienteling, brands are turning to technology solutions in order to execute their clienteling strategies efficiently and grow more quickly - and we recommend any brand or retailer to do the same. Retail clienteling apps like Endear not only let brands scale up their customer outreach, but also (and perhaps more importantly) use data to personalize and professionalize the experience while tracking its performance.

Simply put: clienteling is the act of using customer information to create more personal retail experiences with the goal of relationship building. We go into more detail and why we think it's important in our blog post.