How are you delighting your customers? For large retailers, this question is of paramount importance, especially during the holiday shopping season.
A delighted customer is loyal. Increased loyalty often translates into those customers making more purchases, more often. A recent study found that 50% of loyal customers will make more purchases with their preferred retailer and 60% of those loyal customers are more likely to purchase more frequently. That’s a lot of visions of greenbacks dancing in a retailers’ head.
To successfully engender loyalty in this day and age of endless choice and equally endless holiday sales, retailers are turning back the clock and focusing on improving service as a first step in improving customer experience (CX). The reason is clear: better customer experience translates into increased loyalty. Loyalty builds a nearly impenetrable wall around the relationship your brand has with your best customers.
Retailers are investing in improving CX. For example, in-store many retailers are focusing on empowering employees to proactively address customer concerns. There is also an emphasis on making stores more kid-friendly to allow parents to feel more at ease when shopping with kids in tow. Also in-store there is a focus on expediting purchasing by making transactions more frictionless and finally those with brick-and-mortar stores are rewarding loyal customers with special invitation-only sales events and promotions. There is also a focus on improving the omnichannel customer experience as well. Forbes’ Retail Customer Experience guru Blake Morgan believes retailers need to embrace technology to deliver better customer experience through these channels. Morgan notes, “Customers crave personalized, frictionless experiences, and companies are sprinting to deliver them.”
These technologies can include chatbots and other customer-centric technologies designed to improve speed and efficiency.
Morgan’s belief that consumers are clamoring for frictionless experiences and greater convenience is underscored in our Retail Customer Experience Preferences survey, that shows 41% of surveyed consumers prefer retailers who use chatbots and virtual assistants while an additional 54% said they would be happy if their retailer of choice would use such technology. The reason is that a chatbot or virtual assistant offers convenience, especially outside of normal business hours or when customer service and support lines are inundated.
As a leader in delivering Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVA) for Fortune 500 retail companies (including some leading retail companies), Interactions understands improving CX can generate great returns. Our IVA can help shoppers find stores; discover promotions; check rewards programs; find out where orders are and how to make exchanges and process returns; set up automatic payments and process payments and even provide stress-free tech support. Having access to all these options, customers can even take care of themselves. Our clients see self-service engagement increase by 40%. Also, our IVA delivers a 10-20% increase in customer satisfaction.
Interested in improving your customer loyalty? Are you investing in supporting your customers across all channels and touch points where they interact with your brand and shop what you carry? If improving your customer experience is on your wish list, perhaps it’s time to explore how an IVA can help your customers. Imagine just how much better the holiday shopping season will be for your business in 2020 if your customers can serve themselves by checking their loyalty and rewards programs, check their order and delivery status, and make payments quickly and easily via phone, chat or SMS.
