Today’s retail brands must keep a constant pulse on their customer base—both in-store and online—with a highly empowered, price-conscious consumer in mind. The growth of eCommerce, proliferation of digital devices making it easier to browse and purchase, and social media influences require retailers to create consistent customer experiences across channels. Decision makers are faced with an ever-changing landscape as they actively seek out customer experience (CX) solutions in order to drive new customer acquisition and create brand loyalists.
Expectations are higher than ever and customers are willing to engage with brands if they believe it’s worth their time. This blog provides context on how retail marketing leaders think about their customer experiences and how a world-class CX program can help drive the bottom line.
The retail experience is PERSONAL
THE CHALLENGE
58% of consumers said they valued personalized service, yet only 37% of shoppers feel retailers know them.
To get a true, 360 view of your customers, you need to be able to interact with them on their own terms — that means asking for feedback in a conversational way to solicit their open, honest feedback, and doing so on the channels and in the moments most relevant to them.
This approach allows you to build a unified view of your customers by bringing together feedback from across multiple channels and touchpoints along the customer’s journey.
This is where data silos provide the biggest blocker to CX programs in retail. Think back to the number of channels the average customer uses – then think about the number of different tools, mechanisms, and systems used to understand their experience.
The chances are you’ll have at least a dozen data systems from different survey tools to website analytics, each one holding a vital piece of the puzzle.
With all that data in different systems, when it comes to personalizing the experience, your understanding of your consumer is only ever 1/6th complete, making it near impossible to design personalized experiences that engage customers on their own terms.
By bringing your data together you’re able to understand and react to everything from their preferred methods of communication to their purchase history and how previous interactions with your brand have shaped both their perception and their future behavior.
THE SOLUTION: GET PERSONAL
Break down data silos to view your customer data as a single dataset and create feedback experiences that allow for open, honest conversations so that you develop personal relationships over time.
Retailers need to be able to PREDICT customer behavior
THE CHALLENGE
68% of customers leave because of a bad experience. 91% of those will churn with no warning or prior complaint.
While reactive elements like responding to customer complaints or issues as they arise should be part and parcel of any CX program, what about the silent majority who, unhappy with the experience, will churn with no warning or prior complaint?
That’s where proactive CX management comes in. With all your data in one place, you’ll have enough information to start predicting what customers will do next, giving a voice to that silent majority who won’t simply come out and tell you they’re unhappy.
The latest developments in CX analytics and allow you to analyze and interpret statistical patterns in your data to identify trends and uncover hidden insights without the need for a team of data scientists.
It means you can make connections between different channels and different experiences to understand the cumulative impact of every interaction on the overall experience and, crucially, the impact of any improvements you make along the way.
But going one step further, predictive modelling allows you to use that data to make predictions about future behavior too. Harnessing the power of artificial intelligence to learn on all your historic data, it’s possible to make predictions about customer activity such as churn, alerting you to an issue before it happens, so you can step in and take corrective action.
See how it works with Qualtrics iQ
THE SOLUTION: GET PREDICTIVE
Break down data silos to view your customer data as a single dataset and create feedback experiences that allow for open, honest conversations so that you develop personal relationships over time.
And EMBED it throughout the organization
THE CHALLENGE
2/3 of the workforce is disengaged – studies have shown that disengaged employees deliver a far inferior customer experience to engaged employees
Your employees are the linchpin of customer experience success whether they’re on the frontline dealing with customers day in, day out or in functions like marketing, product development or merchandising.
Having the right insights into the customer experience is a good start, but you need to be able to activate the entire organization – from the leadership right down to the front line – to act on them.
Role-based dashboards and closed-loop ticketing systems that embed CX insights and actions into the tools and processes you’re already using will help to enable everyone in the organization to deliver on the aims of your program.
They’ll have the complete picture of the customer experience, across every channel, as well as the insights, systems, and action planning tools to turn those into actions that improve the customer experience.
THE SOLUTION
Embed your CX program into the tools and processes your teams are already using to make delivering on the customer experience part and parcel of everyone in the organization’s day-to-day work.
Conclusion
Iconic retail brands do more than just respond to upset customers when an issue arises. The market leaders ensure their CX programs provide a means for open, personal conversations to build personal connections, employ the right tools and analysis to fully understand each customer’s behavior, and integrate seamlessly with existing systems to ensure transparency across the organization.
To learn more about how to build and deploy your own world-class retail CX program, download the retail CX eBook, “Become a Leader in Retail Customer Experience”
If you’d like to hear it directly from a Qualtrics retail expert, check out our webinar from today that is now available on-demand “Unlocking the Secret to a Premium Retail Customer Experience.”
