How Can the Clothing Rental Industry Improve Online Customer Experience

Abstract

This thesis examines ways in which the commissioning company Vaatelainaamo Tanttu Oy, as well as the whole clothing rental industry could enhance their customer experience online. Vaatelainaamo Tanttu Oy is a clothing rental business based in Seinäjoki, Finland. Their services are membership based and allow members to rent a piece of clothing for one to three weeks at a time. They currently operate only locally in Seinäjoki. Currently, many businesses need to digitalize their processes and operations in order to stay competitive. Digitalization opens new opportunities for innovation and growth. There are many benefits for digitalizing aspects of business operations, to reduce manual labour, wait time, increase quality of products and services, or to develop their services even further. For customers, digitalization can increase accessibility of services greatly. In this thesis, how digitalization can benefit the customer experience of Vaatelainaamo Tanttu Oy has been researched. This is done by digitalizing aspects of the customer journey. The customer journey is the path of interactions that a customer has with a company and within this path are multiple different customer experience touchpoints. Customer experience itself is a widely debated topic, which has no clear or set definition. It is a concept that holds within it many other constructs, such as: customer satisfaction, service quality, trust and commitment of customers, and customer engagement. In this thesis, the research method used was qualitative. Interviews were conducted with customers, as well as potential customers. These interviews aimed to determine the benefits of the website currently, as well as what could be improved to improve the digital customer experience. The results of this research suggest that the online customer experience is very important for customers, and it could be improved by providing clear information on the website, by adding a catalogue of products, and subscription management options. In order for clothing rentals to become more popular, they must provide easy services for their customers. Clothing rentals could combat fast fashion, if their services were offered to potential customers in a way that can convince them to make the trip to the shop location. Services provided by clothing rentals should be worth the membership fee, so asking the customer to put in more effort than online clothing stores do is not beneficial. Digitalizing aspects like subscription management, or being able to reserve items from the catalogue online can be beneficial to keep up with the competition and to gain customer loyalty.