Digital Clienteling: The Data-Driven Concierge for Luxury Client Experiences

Clienteling drives your brand and bottom line as you maintain client relationships and use them to expand your business and reach. “Relationships” is the key word. Every client interaction is an opportunity to deliver a personalized experience and collect vital client information. That information is essential to nurturing the client-brand bond.

Luxury products and services providers have a particularly heavy burden, as their clients demand superior white-glove service every time they walk through the door. Loyal, repeat business is based on understanding not just their needs. It requires deep, personal information and behaviors. Having that data is what differentiates you from competitors. Today, that door is both physical and digital, adding a layer of complexity – and opportunity – to the luxury client experience.

Why digital clienteling matters

Overall luxury spending, which includes goods and experiences, is expected to grow above $2 trillion by 2030. UHNW individuals alone drove $290 billion in personal luxury goods in 2024 – 21% of the global total. What they seek in luxury providers isn’t just an item or an excursion, but a tailored approach to fulfilling their desires.

High-touch service needs to be woven into the fabric of the entire journey. It has to feel authentic, not just like any other sale. Clients need to believe that every product and experience is made exclusively for them. You’re not just helping them tell their story, you’re helping them live it through what you provide.

Personal versus digital intelligence

The strength of the traditional luxury retail model of a salesperson serving as the point of sale and relationship management is also an inherent weakness. If that salesperson leaves, they take with them the wealth of personal client knowledge they’ve acquired. And purchase records and general interaction notes can’t replace that.

Digital clienteling ensures you capture and store that personal information. While a human salesperson may have a dizzying capacity to remember key client details, nothing can match digital tools. They store, analyze, synthesize, and interpret the entire universe of client information at speed and scale. Then, they turn it into meaningful, actionable insights in a way only technology can.

Clienteling – all or nothing

Consumers want it all. They want both in-person and digital shopping experiences that let them shop with convenience and confidence. With a 59% online/41% in-person split in consumer shopping habits, an omnichannel approach to clienteling ensures you’re capturing the entire universe of customers – and their data. Our Guide to Clienteling explores the fundamentals of relationship-driven, in-person clienteling in more detail. Moreover, the omnichannel approach isn’t just about digital vs real-world. You need to ensure your entire online presence is seamless across your website, social media, email, and apps.

But it’s not just finding that matters – it’s experiencing. Especially for luxury brand consumers, personalized service in an upscale environment is critical to both digital and real-world shopping. Luxury clicks and bricks experiences should provide the same sense of exclusivity: members-only events, private consultations, personalized sales recommendations based on prior sales behavior, and more.

And that can pay off in both the data you collect and your ROI. For example, people with a household income of at least $250K were 14% more likely to say it’s worth more to feel comfortable – and 20% more likely to pay more for high-quality items.

Why digital clienteling is an integral part of luxury marketing

Despite the awareness that customers desire a personalized experience, customer experience perceptions continue to decline. While the numbers show that data is critical to delivering a customized experience, it has not been deployed widely to make a tangible difference for customers. In fact, Forrester reports that US consumer perception of customer experience quality has dropped every year since 2021 and now sits at an all-time low of 69.3. It could not be more clear that data is the key to customer satisfaction.

There’s a disconnect somewhere – and it may be in how companies collect, consolidate, and effectively use customer data. Gartner reports only 14% of organizations have a 360-degree view of their customers – and it’s that holistic understanding that makes clienteling successful.

Luxury marketing teams need digital clienteling tools that let you:

• Collect omnichannel client behavior, preference, and demographic data
• Turn data into actionable content that drives client engagement
• Develop and deliver robust, real-time marketing and communications content
• Track and analyze performance

Holistic, omnichannel intelligence enriches the digital clienteling experience

Every interaction is an opportunity to learn something new about a client. Then, improve every future experience for that client. You need to understand more than UHNWIs’ demographics and spending habits – luxury brands need to know what they care about, what they do, and to whom they’re connected.

The information you collect at every in-person or online event, sale, and other interaction can be cross-referenced to map their network – professional life, nonprofit affiliations, education and membership, and affinity data. And with all this insight integrated into your CRM, you can identify opportunities for warm introductions and tailor outreach in ways that feel authentic and relevant. Every online or in-person meeting then becomes another link in a genuine relationship built on understanding who they are and what they aspire.

Supercharge your CRM with integrated data

The one kind of teamwork luxury brands often overlook is in their data. Integrating all your client information within your CRMs lets you apply APIs – essentially instructions that tell your systems to “team up,” what to look for and what to do with it – that can turn your wealth of information into value.

They can work within your CRMs to make client intelligence, spending preferences, hobbies, and interests, purchase patterns, and more into immediately accessible data. This speeds up segmentation, prioritization, and personalization, allowing you to save time by matching and enriching contacts at scale, as well as prioritizing outreach based on influence, wealth, and relevance. You’ll be able to plan a robust clienteling strategy, including events, gifting, and loyalty programs, more easily.

Align your data strategy and client experience

How well do you think you’re aligning your client knowledge with your clients’ experience? Here’s a surprising (and sobering) statistic: 80% of companies think they’re delivering a great experience…but only 8% of clients agree. Meanwhile, Deloitte research shows a 140% jump in spending when customers have positive over negative experiences.

How do you bridge the perception gap and get close to that 140% goal? Again, it all comes down to how you harness and use your data. Everyone on your team – client acquisition, marketing, guest development, loyalty, and others – needs to be on the same page, from discovery to long-term loyalty.

All that data you’ve collected, analyzed, and synthesized forms the soul of your digital clienteling experience. You’ll create a personalized journey that covers your entire brand – web, social, and email, with content that is attuned to the luxury client’s product and service needs and overall aspirations.

Your in-store and online staff will be armed with not just the right things to say, but when and how to best communicate. And this all has one goal: making the client feel like they’re being cared for, not sold to. You’ll be able to align your business and expansion strategies with experiential and, again, aspirational offerings that speak to UHNW clients where they live, travel, and spend.

Data isn’t a luxury – it’s a necessity for digital clienteling

Knowledge is truly power for luxury brands. The more you know about your clients – and the better you apply that knowledge – the stronger, more authentic relationships and deeper networking opportunities you’ll build with them.
 
Check out ways you can maximize your digital clienteling strategy to connect with the individuals who matter most to your business. Request a meeting here for a personalized demo from our team.