Target’s No. 1 Goal: To Become a Leader in Digital Customer Engagement

Brian Cornell has been CEO at Target for a little more than a year and his drive toward enhanced customer engagement, customer experience, and, ultimately, brand loyalty is very apparent.

Cornell’s No. 1 strategic priority is for Target to become a leader in digital customer engagement.

“First on our list is to become a leader in digital,” Cornell said during Target’s Aug. 19 second-quarter earnings conference call, according to Seeking Alpha. “This is critically important because guest research shows that digital relevance drives traffic and engagement across all selling channels. While we’re pleased with the industry leading growth we’ve seen so far this year, we have much more work to do. We’re already shipping digital orders from approximately 140 stores and, by the end of this year, we’ll be shipping for more than 450 locations.”

Ship-from-store capabilities allows Target to balance inventory across the network, leverage the capital and labor already in its stores, and reach customers more quickly.

“To highlight the benefits in improved shipping times, this fall we’ll begin testing what we’re calling available-to-promise in which we’ll give the guest a specific delivery commitment, typically two or three business days,” Cornell explained. “If the guest orders on a specific date, we believe this capability will drive further increases in digital conversion rates, which are already improving rapidly as guest respond to a faster and firmer delivery commitment.”

What’s more, Cornell wants to develop capabilities to offer more localized experiences across Target stores, providing a more personalized digital experience for customers.

“While this work is ongoing, we’re already seeing encouraging signs of the early progress on both fronts,” he said. “To inform our localization efforts, we launched a small test in the Chicago market where we’re working with a set of stores to test changes to assortment, presentation, and inventory commitments on certain items. In these stores we’re highlighting locally relevant items, updating category adjacencies, and changing shelf facings to reflect the demographics around these individual stores.”

Second-quarter digital sales grew 30% from a year ago, which was slightly below company expectations “as we compared against very intense digital channel promotions last year,” Cornell said.