The holiday season is one of the busiest for everyone in the luxury retail industry. A surge in foot traffic, increased inquiries from your website, increased sales (and exchanges), and higher customer demands on every member of the sales team. So which tasks should sales associates drop—and which should they lean into—to be clienteling rock stars?
We asked Shawn Bulow, Account Executive at Clientbook, what he’s learned from the retailers he’s talked with:
"A lot of retailers have a good client base that want to buy from you again. Clientbook helps you reach back out to those customers and get them back in the door for repeat business. Most retailers are missing out on that revenue.”
Save time and energy by dropping these busy season activities
Identify tasks that you can defer without affecting daily operations or customer relations. Ideally, you begin to plan these changes months in advance. By making strategic adjustments, you streamline processes, set up for additional sales, and make sure every shopper feels valued. This business strategy helps ensure that they stick around after the gift-buying season is over.
1 – Stop changing or updating visual merchandising displays
This might seem counterintuitive when it comes to organizing and decorating your retail space with unique holiday designs or collections. However, the busy season is not the time to switch things up frequently with your displays. Come up with the right plan, set it up, and then focus solely on keeping the displays neat and attractive. This goes for shelves, racks, and window displays alike.
Visual merchandising plays a big role in attracting attention. However, when foot traffic is naturally higher anyway, changing things too often can get in the way of easy shopping. It also takes time away from the associates, who should focus on making retail sales and customer service.
2 – Shorten your staff meetings
The busy season is not the right time to introduce new business strategy options or change up your sales efforts in a big way. Any holiday-focused marketing should already be in place and running as intended. Cut staff meetings to avoid confusion, overwhelming team members with new information, and to boost morale. Remember that they are just as busy in their personal lives getting ready for the holidays as your shoppers are. Aim for concise, focused meetings that prioritize specific information.
By limiting meetings to 15–20 minutes, you can foster a sense of urgency and focus on essential topics, such as daily sales goals, product updates, and any pressing customer feedback. Additionally, leveraging digital tools, such as shared calendars and messaging apps, allows for quick communication and updates without the need for lengthy in-person discussions.
3 – Avoid last-minute marketing messages
While the holiday season practically demands more unique marketing messages it's important to develop the campaigns and set these up far in advance of the busy season. Schedule email newsletters, social media posts, and other ads. Then, you don't have to worry about day-to-day posting or updates while you're busy with customer care. And you don’t have to worry about burning out your customers with marketing fatigue.
Consider repurposing successful past content or leveraging customer testimonials and user-generated content to keep marketing efforts engaging without requiring significant additional work. This not only saves time but also fosters community engagement, making shoppers feel more connected to the brand, which augments the overall customer journey.
4 – Back-office tasks: Both practical and administrative
Lack of efficiency is the true enemy of busy holiday season operations. Automating as many of these common challenges as possible is the smart way to go.
Drop anything that does not immediately affect the customer experience. You have to fulfill orders promptly, of course, but you don’t have to file documentation updates or collate your databases while shoppers wait for your attention. Streamline tasks, focus on operational efficiency, and don't give up on what really matters.
Never stop clienteling no matter what the season
Personalization, the cornerstone of clienteling, improves every single metric used to determine if a marketing message or strategy works or not. It can boost revenue 10%, reduces cost-to-acquisition by half, and improves efficiency.
From a customer perspective, lack of personalized experience is a death knell for ongoing brand loyalty or, indeed, any additional purchases at all. More than 62% of online shoppers would move away from a particular retail brand if they didn't get the personal touch they wanted.
Conclusion
There's no doubt about what shoppers want. Clienteling is all about offering a highly personalized shopping experience that makes each customer feel seen, valued, and understood. By focusing on individual preferences, past purchases, and specific needs, clienteling transforms standard customer service into a tailored, relationship-driven approach that builds lasting loyalty. You can’t slow down or drop these efforts no matter how busy you are. With a tool like Clientbook, however, the process becomes highly efficient and virtually automated in some cases.
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