Focus on customer service as a competitive advantage…
Retailers who want to build customer loyalty must continue offering a positive customer experience.
To do so, you’ll need to develop a comprehensive strategy that incorporates cutting-edge technology to curate or improve the customer experience.
With a lot of innovative technologies on the market and customers demanding fast and accurate services, most retailers do not know what is best for their business.
The blog discusses the importance of customer experience in retail, as well as customer experience trends in retail that employ innovative technologies to provide personalized and consistent customer journeys.
Importance of Customer Service in Retail
In retail, customer service entails establishing a smooth experience that shows customers that you care not only about sales but also about their post-purchase satisfaction.
According to a survey, 78% of customers have bailed on a transaction or not made an intended purchase because of a poor service experience.
Positive customer experiences in the retail industry are largely influenced by a variety of factors such as products, pricing, staff behavior, responsive communication, and personalization.
Retailers must value customer service for the following reasons:
- To create loyal customer relationships
As the customer experience does not end with the sale, it is critical for retailers to provide help after the sale as well. Customers will be willing to make repeat purchases with you if they have confidence in your assurance that you will address their concerns without hassles.
- Customers read peer reviews
Customers prefer reading, rating, and sharing product/service reviews online. Therefore there is a high chance that these reviews will influence their opinions and perceptions of your brand. When a poor experience is shared on social media, it is intensified, causing damage to your reputation. If you’re not careful, negative reviews can potentially drive away your current customers.
A survey says, 89% of consumers have switched to doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience.
Image: Customer Experience Statistics
8 Retail Customer Experience Trends to Follow in 2022
Let’s take a look at some of the most recent trends that the retail industry should be aware of in order to win the game of customer experience.
1. AI-powered Personalization at every stage of the Customer Journey.
It’s critical to have a 360-degree view of customer profiles for providing personalized service at discrete levels.
Kapture, a customer service automation platform enables you to make product suggestions to customers based on their preferences. It also allows customer service agents to send personalized communication to customers.
Kapture uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) that draws insights from customers’ purchase history, browsing habits, and demographics to provide personalized suggestions.
2. Impressive Self-Help Capabilities
That’s AI all over again. Chatbots powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) assist customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in finding solutions to their problems. It directs customers to contextually relevant automated responses.
Additionally, you can provide a variety of self-help resources to customers, such as web portals and interactive discussion forums.
3. Switch over to Omnichannel Support and Marketing
It pays to use an omnichannel service to ensure that your customers have a consistent experience across all platforms.
An omnichannel strategy integrates different platforms and communication channels to provide customers with a unified experience.
“On average, companies that use omnichannel customer engagement strategies keep 89 percent of their customers.”
4. Dissolve Data Silos to Unify Organizational Data
Cloud-based CRM systems collate information such as customer details, complaints, inventory data, employee information, and so on a centralized platform. Sales and service agents can deliver quick and personalized solutions to customer difficulties with a uniform view.
5. Implement a Prompt Feedback Collection Mechanism
Customers prefer to leave immediate feedback after an interaction or a purchase experience. Collect surveys through apps, chatbots, and emails since customers can express themselves more easily and quickly through these convenient channels.
This enables brands to receive customer input more quickly, allowing them to develop and deliver what their customers want.
Image: Source
6. Incorporate Visual Engagement
As more retailers turn to video to boost their marketing efforts, it’s time to give your marketing tactics a new spin as well.
A survey reports that 85% of millennials say they’ve purchased after viewing a marketing video.
Videos on promotions, client testimonials, and product demonstrations can all be used to keep your customers interested.
Email video URLs in bulk to the customers as part of your marketing campaign. Through CRM solutions you can send emails to several customer groups that have been segmented by demographics.
The Knowledge Management System, a feature of CRM, lets you include video lessons to clarify the troubleshooting procedures or other how-to guides to help customers with information.
7. Powerful Reporting and Analytics
Spot trends in customer orders and preferences through reporting and analytics features provided by customer service automation software.
Drill down to reasons as to why customers abandon a particular product, the hours or days they shop, and several such impactful trends. You can therefore channel your marketing efforts to provide a better customer experience.
8. Empower Employees to Enhance Customer Experience
You care for your employees, and they care for your customers. A simple formula like that can do wonders for your business, right?
Access to information is the most basic demand that employees would like to have at their disposal. Employees who have quick access to information are better equipped to manage any type of customer request, thereby reducing resolution time and increasing ROI.
Kapture has some of the most amazing tools for employee empowerment, such as the Virtual Assistant, which is driven by Artificial Intelligence and assists employees by contextually answering their inquiries.
Side Conversation is a collaboration function that allows employees to communicate on a customer request with third-party providers or other agents.
Canned Responses are configurable pre-packaged response templates that allow you to swiftly respond to customer inquiries. Improved response times can go a long way toward improving customer experience.
As a result, investing in Kapture’s data-driven and collaborative solutions, which enable every employee to create a tailored customer experience, is well worth it.
Why you should Choose a Leading Retail CRM?
Kapture, a customer service relationship management software, assists in offering a superior customer experience and optimizing your retail operations. Here’s how Kapture goes about doing it.
- A CRM gives you insights about your outreach that most traditional communication channels can’t, such as which customers are viewing and responding to your communications. You may then utilize this information to better identify who you should follow up with and ensure that significant customers don’t slip through the cracks.
- Helps you segment customers so you can market your product to the right people and increase your chances of cross-selling.
- Provides canned responses to respond to consumer inquiries about exchanges and return claims as quickly as possible.
- Provides consistent and personalized assistance to your customers, throughout the customer journey. Helps create tailored messages for your mailing list’s strategic customers based on a range of factors like previous engagement, geography, and purchase history.
- Helps track purchases, orders, complaints, and delivery statuses of your customers. Allows you to send an order confirmation email every time an order is placed or at other key points in the customer journey.
- Offers self-service capabilities to empower your customers to resolve issues on their own. This helps reduce your customer support workload and free up time for your employees.
- Offers a centralized database within which you can run the sales, marketing, and service operations.
- Knowledge Management System allows you to maintain and access a centralized data repository where you can store all of your company’s information. The customer support software’s knowledge base and discussion forum enable quick and collaborative issue solving.
- A unified dashboard allows you to manage all of your retail activities in one place. Kapture’s customizable dashboard makes managing contracts and licensing with your manufacturers and distributors a breeze. This allows you to keep track of your renewals and lapses. Furthermore, manage your inventory, track orders, and generate invoices.
- Offers powerful reporting and analysis options, to keep track of your company’s sales, product stock fluctuations, average order amounts, and other retail KPIs.
- Generates order reports to determine which products are working well and which are not. With information from your reports, you can forecast trends, optimize stock levels, and manage retail profitability.
- When you thoroughly understand your customers’ needs, you can better serve them. You can see what customers are saying on social media, reply to them, track queried topics, and improve your social media game from the very unified and intuitive CRM dashboard.
The future of retail is about having the best of both worlds-a strong physical presence plus an amazing online presence.
With Kapture, you can perfect your retail operations by integrating the latest technology trends to create a superior customer experience.
About the Author | |
 | Seema C Mohan |
| Seema C Mohan is passionate about all things XaaS and loves to write value-added content. She has been in Business Process Management in the past and has published technology articles in journals. | |
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