Introduction
Retail customer experience is the sum total of all in-store & online experiences which customers get across all touchpoints throughout the customer journey. And businesses seek to improve it in order to enhance customer satisfaction, retention, & metrics like repeat purchases. Businesses ask how to improve customer experience? For that, consistency is the key as this McKinsey report highlights. You will have to offer consistent cust ex across all in-store & online channels. This may be achieved by digital transformation of the company through the right tech stack. You will have to streamline all the BPs concerning cust ex to iron out all the complexities which customers face in shopping experience, communication, support, feedback & some other activities. In this blog, we will take you through actionable insight on how to improve & analyze customer experience using proprietary software. But before that let’s go through the core principles of 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 & be proactive in assisting them.
Consistency
Consistent customer experience is the key when it comes to enhancing customer loyalty. Employ the right customer service software to eliminate the disconnect between the online & in-store experience. Measure customer experience to ensure a consistent experience across customer journey.
CRM system
Use CRM systems to manage all interactions & relationships with your customers & offer the right product & services which suits customers.
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 in engaging customers online.
Brand familiarization
Create content collaterals & webpages which provide complete insight about your brand including your products & services.
Why is improving customer experience important?
To improve customer experience is a blessing for your brand. It acts as a point of differentiation for your brand thus giving you competitive advantage & creating customer loyalty. This in turn ensures long-term customer association & word-of-mouth marketing benefitting your business in the long run. Given below is the result of a survey which asks brands why improving customer experience is important.
How retailers can 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 & efficient to keep this data updated in real time & share with various teams who need it for various purposes. Brands will be able to see the history of all customer interactions. This data full of purchase & contact information gives revealing insights about customer behavior & how you made them feel? (customer feedback). This database acts as an information powerhouse providing key findings on where you got your acts right & where it went wrong. It helps to improve your brand loyalty.
By gathering customer feedback
A good customer experience management system has the attribute to track valuable customer feedback across channels. The CX management solutions are designed with a survey engine which collects feedback from customers at all touchpoints in the customer journey & pulls responses into your system. One thing to remember here is the survey link should be sharable on omnichannel platforms to gain maximum customer traction, & the 2nd point is, the survey has not to be too long, just a couple of questions will be enough to collect necessary insight on most occasions.
Interactive Dashboards
A dashboard is the key feature in the customer loyalty experience management software which surfaces insights & important metrics generated on the basis of survey & customer feedback collected. Therefore, key metrics like NPS, CSAT surveys & others are displayed on the dashboard giving you precious information about the customer. The most memorable part in an advanced system is an interactive, customizable, role-based dashboard which provides key metrics based on the role of the viewer. For example, marketing head & customer service executives might not be interested in the same metrics, these dashboards can differentiate information based on the users’ role.
Customer response management
As a customer-first organization which 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 in the same platform where you collect the feedback. Thus, right 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 & assign a ticket to the appropriate person in case they receive a negative response from the customers.
Analytics
Most CXM software have built-in analytics capabilities which allows retailers to get key customer insight 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 CSAT is 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 provide light on insights like which words are appearing frequently in the customer feedback & which topics are spoken in the positive & negative way.
Key driver analysis:
Analyzes relationships between different variables in detail so that you know what is the driving force behind the key metrics like NPS & revenue & focus on those areas.
Conclusion
Technology is the exponent of the retail industry. A strategic implementation of the right technology holds the key to increase in the customer experience consistency & boosting shopping experience. Above all, it inspires new ways to deal with customers & enhance customer loyalty in the long run by underlining the importance of customer experience. In this blog, we have covered some points on how retailers can leverage technology to enhance customer experience. We have also introduced you to an innovative, technology trailblazer – WovVXM. We would like to add something more about it before we wind up – this software solution is available in FREE-FOREVER format giving you the option to use it till the end without paying any charges. Yes, the solution is completely free. Try it once, it is great!
