Introduction
The retail customer experience is the sum total of all in-store and online experiences that customers get across all touchpoints throughout the customer journey. And businesses seek to improve it in order to enhance customer satisfaction, retention, and metrics like repeat purchases. Businesses ask, How do I improve the customer experience? For that, consistency is the key, as this McKinsey report highlights. You will have to offer consistent customer service across all in-store and online channels. This may be achieved through the digital transformation of the company with the right tech stack. You will have to streamline all the BPs concerning customer experience to iron out all the complexities that customers face in the shopping experience, communication, support, feedback, and some other activities. In this blog, we will take you through actionable insight on how to improve and analyze customer experiences using proprietary software. But before that, let’s go through the core principles of a good customer experience.
The driving principles of a successful retail customer experience
Social listening
You have to have an elaborate social-listening mechanism. Be an active listener, go out of your way to hear out your customers across all channels, and be proactive in assisting them.
Consistency
A consistent customer experience is the key to enhancing customer loyalty. Employ the right customer service software to eliminate the disconnect between online and in-store experiences. Measure the customer experience to ensure a consistent experience across the customer journey.
CRM system: Use CRM systems to manage all interactions and relationships with your customers and offer the right products and services that suit them.
Customer Engagement:
Keep customer engagement at the core of your customer-facing philosophy. Use in-store learning to curate better brand content, which can help engage customers online.
How can retailers use software to enhance CX?
One place to have all customer information
Customer experience management software has a common, centralized repository where all customer data is stored. It is very easy and efficient to keep this data updated in real time and share it with various teams that need it for various purposes. Brands will be able to see the history of all customer interactions. This data, full of purchase and contact information, gives revealing insights about customer behavior and how you made them feel. (customer feedback). This database acts as an information powerhouse, providing key findings on where you got your act right and where it went wrong. It helps improve brand loyalty.
By gathering customer feedback
A good customer experience management system has the ability to track valuable customer feedback across channels. The CX management solutions are designed with a survey engine that collects feedback from customers at all touchpoints in the customer journey and pulls responses into your system. One thing to remember here is that the survey link should be sharable on omnichannel platforms to gain maximum customer traction, and the second point is that the survey has not to be too long; just a couple of questions will be enough to collect the necessary insight on most occasions.
Interactive Dashboards
A dashboard is the key feature in customer loyalty experience management software that surfaces insights and important metrics generated on the basis of surveys and customer feedback collected. Therefore, key metrics like NPS, CSAT surveys, and others are displayed on the dashboard, giving you precious information about the customer. The most memorable part of an advanced system is an interactive, customizable, role-based dashboard that provides key metrics based on the role of the viewer. For example, marketing heads and customer service executives might not be interested in the same metrics; these dashboards can differentiate information based on the users’ roles.
Customer response management
As a customer-first organization that believes in offering novelties to customers, you must go a step further than simply analyzing the customer feedback to provide a solution to the customers, because at the end of the day, that’s what a customer is concerned about. This is called a closed-loop system. It allows you to close the loop on the same platform where you collect feedback. Thus, from sending the survey questions to collecting responses to finding a resolution, all can be done through the same system. A CXM software, WovVXM from WovVTech, is the case in point here. It allows the users to create and assign a ticket to the appropriate person in case they receive a negative response from the customers.
Analytics
Most CXM software has built-in analytics capabilities, which allow retailers to get key customer insights from raw data, saving hundreds of hours of manual work. These applications have plenty of types of analysis:
Statistical analysis:
Do different types of statistical analysis, for example, relate one variable to another (how is CSAT affected by call waiting time?)? Do multivariate regression, which takes hundreds of variables into consideration to understand the effect of each one on others.
Word cloud analysis:
In these methods, you can do sentiment analysis by analyzing open-text responses. They shed light on insights like which words are appearing frequently in the customer feedback and which topics are spoken about in a positive or negative way.
Key driver analysis:
Analyzes relationships between different variables in detail so that you know what is the driving force behind key metrics like NPS and revenue and focus on those areas.
Conclusion
Technology is the essence of the retail industry. A strategic implementation of the right technology holds the key to increasing customer experience consistency and boosting the shopping experience. Above all, it inspires new ways to deal with customers and enhances customer loyalty in the long run by underscoring the importance of the customer experience. In this blog, we have covered some points on how retailers can leverage technology to enhance the customer experience. We have also introduced you to an innovative technology trailblazer, WovVXM.
