Is end-to-endless customer service the key to the great retail renaissance?

Unprecedented macroeconomic challenges have manifested a state of permanent flux in the retail industry. The pandemic, geopolitical tensions, climate change and cost-of-living crisis have all redefined consumer behaviours. For resilience in these new waters, retailers must reshape conventional thinking and rekindle the essence of customer service.

We are at the nexus of digital innovation and human-centred values. The shopping journey is now becoming a continuum where every touchpoint is an opportunity for connection – and this end-to-endless interaction invites retailers to rediscover their purpose. This evolution marks an opportunity for retailers to redefine their core purpose, reinvent consumer engagement, and ultimately reinvigorate their brands.

Where strategies were once dominated by productivity and cost reduction – relegating customer interactions to cost drivers – with the abundance of data and analytics, service interactions are an avenue for growth.

Become a service champion

Proactive support demonstrates a deeper understanding of your customer, which grows trust by mitigating the frequency of customer-initiated interaction. Simple starters can include company marketing software which uses a mass email program to share company updates, or notify customers of possible issues they might face, or generally educating customers on product use and features.

For more advanced practices, always-on technology gathers important insights into common service triggers.

And predictive capabilities, in this sense, can support in the proactive identification of issues or behaviours that may need attention.

Meeting these expectations isn’t necessarily an easy feat and it requires investment to drive continual innovation in how you deliver proactive support. But when you can get this service to work seamlessly in the background, you make your customers’ – and your – lives easier.

Online furniture and homewares brand Temple & Webster recently heralded its return to year-on-year growth in the investment of AI as helping the ecommerce store drive benefits for their customers and reduce costs.

Chatbots have been able to provide proactive support and suggestions to customers, regulating presale
product queries, which contributed to almost 25 per cent of all customer enquiries. The result? Better conversion rates and increased customer satisfaction.

Using customer insights to provide value

Customers want less focus on completing transactions and more emphasis on becoming a trusted advisor. This kind of approach isn’t new in B2B, but in B2C where the scale is much bigger, it has traditionally been deemed as too complex or costly to orchestrate.

Here, data proves invaluable in understanding the depths of customer wants and needs. Give teams access to relevant customer information, like sales histories or wishlists, which staff can leverage to provide personalised upselling and product recommendations.

Leading beauty retailer Sephora has been able to build up a loyal customer base of beauty enthusiasts through its game-changing mobile retail app. While apps are now seen as a necessity for any retailers looking to break-through in ecommerce, Sephora’s initial move into this market proved revolutionary.

Through continued investment in innovation and user-centricity, Sephora’s app has seamlessly integrated
customer data to provide high-class, personalised shopping recommendations, virtual try-on features and clear product information, reviews, and pricing in a simple and easy-to-use format. By better understanding user-preferences and creating an easy-to-navigate app, Sephora raised the bar for retail technology.

Gathering insights from across every point of a customer journey is essential in fully understanding and
resolving a customer’s situation – a value which plays out in driving satisfaction and loyalty.

Capturing feedback to propel growth

The more service is integrated into product development, the greater the potential for revenue growth.
Offering a formal mechanism for capturing and understanding customer feedback can help customers feel valued and heard – think, regular feedback surveys or even monitoring the comments on social media
channels.

These insights can not only improve the customers future experience, but elevate overall outcomes. Amazon has always been a pioneer of this and they run a tight ship when it comes to customer feedback. Public product reviews not only encourage sellers to improve their offerings, but also influences consumer purchasing decisions and gives credibility to merchants.

Moving from transactions to experience centres With these three opportunities for growing trust between retailers and consumers, shops are now no longer the final step of the sales funnel, but an integral part of the discovery and education experience. We’ve widely discussed the benefits of an omnichannel retail approach, but with this constant customer connection underpinned by omnipresence on and offline, new opportunities are created.

Present day shopping experiences must seamlessly integrate into people’s digital routines. This means
digitising the in-person shopping experience; built for education, entertainment and tailored service.

Does the customer want to see if an item is in stock in another local store? Are other colours available online? Will a sold-out product be back in stock soon? Providing staff with the tools to help customer queries in-store, in real time, not only meets the expectations of demanding audiences, but brings a rich blend of human-digital interactions into stores.

It may seem overwhelming, and whilst it’s important to have a vision or final destination, it’s even more
important to start the journey. For example, supermarkets aren’t going to wake up one day and take all the food out of their stores and replace them with digital screens. Gradually shifting into this new environment will ease the change for employees and customers alike.

Service is the new currency

Shoppers are putting a premium on tailored, engaging and educational in-person shopping experiences.
Service transformation means taking a renewed focus towards the experience that is delivered to customers; as experience fuels growth, the service role looks at exceeding expectations across all channels.

It’s a tough climate, and it demands audacious thinking and rapid adaptation to fluctuating consumer
expectations and supply chain complexities. But if retailers can make it through these muddy waters, the
challenges will become catalysts of transformation and propel the industry towards a renaissance.

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