CX in retail is changing. Consider loyalty programmes. Many businesses now offer paid loyalty schemes – or “VIP member clubs” - instead of points-based systems.
These often include the opportunity for paying customers to contribute to social decision-making for meaningful engagement, making them feel like an integral part of the brand.
Target does this through its RedCard, allowing customers to vote on how they direct donations to numerous worthy charities.
Another emerging trend is fitting additional services around products, such as delivery and installation, expanded warranty, and post-sale tech support. Some of which are free, whereas others may generate additional revenue streams.
Adding these features allows retailers to differentiate their offerings beyond the purchase alone.
These are just two of the key trends changing retail experiences. There are many more, and part of a business’s headache is simply focusing on the right areas to maintain customer loyalty and deliver retail therapy.
What Drives Retail Therapy?
What drives a good or bad experience from a customer’s perspective? Many businesses struggle to answer this question as “dark data” hides the answer – i.e. data that they just cannot reach.
As such, it is easy to make incorrect assumption about what customers want. When this happens, targeted CX improvement actions miss the mark, resources fall into the wrong place, and companies fail to maximize their CX investment.
Such retail headaches come at a cost: 32 percent of all customers would stop doing business with a brand after one bad experience, even one they loved, according to PWC.
To course-correct, consider digging into conversational data, analyzing positive service experiences, and spotlighting excellent behaviors.
To do so, use a combination of omnichannel conversational data, speech analytics, and social listening tools – such as storm CONTACT™: SOCIAL. These tools also allow brands to map these behaviors across all channels and uncover whether agents are delivering.
Yet, on top of this, consider customer emotion – which is also possible to track with speech analytics.
After all, selling is not only about the product itself anymore but about the emotions and experiences around it. As Martin Taylor, Deputy CEO and Co-Founder of Content Guru, adds:
“Many businesses are harnessing analytics to pinpoint the customer emotions that drive value and are using these to design emotionally engaging experiences – both in-store and online.”
With this knowledge of customer sentiment, retailers can train their people to evoke the right emotions while tailoring customer journeys to generate loyalty and increase revenue.
Building Omnichannel Experiences in Retail
For many organizations, jumping straight into AI and analytics is jumping the gun. Without a strong omnichannel ecosystem underpinning the contact center, businesses will not be able derive maximum value from these technologies.
Furthermore, these unprepared organizations are unlikely to tackle other prominent retail headaches; such as failing to track a customer’s interaction history or seamlessly switching conversations across channels.
As such, customers find themselves repeating information, or otherwise dealing with clunky online navigation systems. Meanwhile, support staff gain little insight into the customer journey, causing confusion and driving up handling times.
The best CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) platforms, like the storm Cloud Contact Center, unify all channels on a single platform to enable omnichannel experiences. To do so, they leverage enterprise data through integrations with various applications, systems, and databases.