Editorial
The Gist
- Retail’s self-service success. Retail’s excellence in self-service options demonstrates the growing importance of empowering customers to solve simple queries independently across all industries.
- Omnichannel mastery. The retail sector’s seamless omni-channel support shows the necessity of meeting customers on their preferred platforms, ensuring a smooth transition between service channels.
- The power of personalization. Retail’s focus on personalized experiences highlights the value of tailoring interactions to individual customer needs, a strategy that all sectors should adopt to enhance loyalty and satisfaction.
A core objective of meeting customer experience expectations is shared by all industries and across public services. The challenges faced by each sector are unique, often nuanced and driven by the needs of the customer base, with methodologies for achieving success consequently varying.
One sector that consistently excels in CX is retail. Led by titans such as Amazon, retail has long set the standard in how to please customers, a phenomenon often referred to as the "Amazon Effect." For retail consumers, CX excellence comes as no surprise. Well-known giants and ambitious new entrants set and continually raise the CX bar, driven on by a ferociously competitive marketplace and the need to attract and retain an increasingly fickle consumer base. These imperatives are pushing even small consumer-facing businesses to innovate their CX.
Consequently in 2023 retail, alongside luxury automotive, was the only sector to improve its industry-average CX scores in Forrester’s US CX Index, with all other industries dropping points for a second consecutive year.
With customer-first organizations seeing almost double the revenue of their non-customer-focused competitors, CX leaders from all sectors should analyze what works well within retail. But what are the headline strategies and how are they moving the CX needle?
Self-Service Options
Firstly, retail allows customers to perform simple tasks independently, without the need for direct contact, by offering self-service capabilities for common enquiries such as account updates, shipping information and returns.
When you consider customer demographics, offering self-service capabilities becomes especially important. Almost 40% of Gen Z and millennial customers won’t try and resolve a query unless they can use self-service options, which would cause over 50% to never shop at that company again.
Not every sector can copy and paste retail methodologies for self-service support. For example, in the insurance and financial services industries, it is likely that customers will want to speak to an agent over the phone, as their reason for calling will likely be stressful or emotive.
Despite this, customer preferences are changing. It is estimated that up to 40% of insurance customers prefer to interact through an insurer's digital channels, including self-service, versus only 25% through voice. This shift in channel preferences underlines the importance, across all sectors, of adaptation to changing customer expectations.
Related Article: In-Store Experiences: Revamping Retail With Tech
Omnichannel Support
When self-service reaches its limits, omnichannel contact capabilities become key. If the transition between self-service and assisted service is high-effort, customers will suffer a disjointed experience and poor CX, leading to elevated abandonment rates. According to Gartner, 88% of customer journeys that start in self-service use at least one other channel, such as email, webchat or voice, before resolution, potentially resulting in increased numbers in your Customer effort Score (CES).
Retail leaders have perfected omnichannel support, meeting customers on their own terms, whether through traditional, digital or social channels. This approach ensures seamless interactions and convenience for customers.
Failure to resolve queries efficiently is frustrating for consumers. In one survey 89% of customers who tried solving their query through digital, social or channels had to resort to voice, as their issue could not be resolved. In an ideal world, digital experiences would satisfy customers' desire for First Contact Resolution (FCR), and good omnichannel capabilities could make this journey more streamlined and frictionless, ensuring customers still reach their desired outcome regardless of the complexity of their enquiry.
Increased Personalization
Knowledge is power and understanding your customers, regardless of sector, is essential to growing a successful business and maintaining good CX. The expectation of personalized customer experience is also increasing: 71% of customers expect businesses to deliver personalized experiences during each and every interaction, regardless of sector.
Personalization is a hallmark of retail customer experience, with businesses using granular customer data to create tailored experiences and recommendations. An individualized approach fosters loyalty and satisfaction while reducing both customer and agent effort through eliminating the need to repeat and re-key information already held by an organization, such as names, addresses and enquiry history.
Adoption of Generative AI
The next frontier for retail CX is the integration of generative AI, which will further personalize and streamline customer interactions. 45% of CCaaS executives say that ChatGPT’s popularity and accessibility has prompted a rise in AI investments within the CX industry, seen by many as “ground zero” for the adoption of generative AI in mainstream businesses.
AI chatbots, specifically, help to minimize the volume of overall interactions while simultaneously increasing customer satisfaction for less complex queries, such as checking shipping details or requesting a refund. Available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and in multiple languages, AI-enabled chatbots are predicted to become a primary channel by 2027. As a result, both customer and agent experiences will improve as chatbots siphon off simple enquiries, leaving the agent to focus on building connections with customers and handling complex or emotive queries.
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Retail: Leading the Way?
Retail customer experience's success sets a high bar that other sectors can aspire to meet. By adopting omnichannel support, enhancing self-service options and leveraging personalization and AI, industries across the board can improve their CX.
However, it’s crucial to adapt retail’s strategies to sector-specific challenges in order to deliver seamless, effective and personalized experiences that meet and exceed today’s great expectations.
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