“As Seen On Screen” Shopping With a Sympathetic Side.

In this blog, Insight Manager Chloe Kent and Insight Executive Magdalena Paczocha discuss their experience with the online clothing retailer ASOS and the reasons why they think ASOS demonstrates Closeness.

Both of us love online shopping – even if the aim is not to buy anything, reviewing the latest trends and outfit inspirations is one of our favourite pass times. This is especially true in summer, when we have weddings and parties to attend and need to refresh our wardrobes.

While discussing shopping habits in the office one day we noticed that we’d both had great experience when shopping with ASOS. And we both felt like ASOS understood the situations we were in and treated us as individuals.

Closeness, one of the building blocks of our Loyalty Model, can set a brand apart from their competitors in highly crowded markets like online retailers. In the UK, the rise of online brands such as Boohoo or Pretty Little Thing, endorsed by multiple D list celebrities, makes it difficult for brands to retain customers and even more difficult to earn loyalty. Virtually all online clothing retailers offer their customers discounts, premium offers through their apps and next day deliveries. In these circumstances, all these aspects of online shopping become basic hygienic factors to consumers – it’s something that we simply just expect from any retailer in the current market. ASOS, however, earns loyalty by going one step further – by showing they understand busy lives and packed schedules.

In Magdalena’s case, the mistake was on the side of the customer. Having ordered the same dress in two different sizes to choose from for a friend’s wedding, Magdalena accidently returned the dress that she was meant to keep! When she realised her mistake, the return window had long expired, and she was left with the wrong dress shortly before the event. She contacted ASOS customer service, and after explaining that she made a genuine mistake and is now stuck with a dress she cannot squeeze into, ASOS sent her a ‘special circumstances’ return label for the wrong dress and a gift voucher to order a new dress which arrived the next day.

In Chloe’s case, the fault was on ASOS’s side. She’d ordered a dress for her birthday with next day delivery, but the dress didn’t arrive when it was supposed to, which meant that Chloe would potentially have to go out and buy another dress. When she contacted ASOS, although apprehensive at first, the customer service agent decided they didn’t want to ruin Chloe’s birthday, and offered her a full refund of the delivery fee as well as the cost of the dress, and let Chloe keep that dress anyway – a birthday present from ASOS itself, owing up to their mistake.