Five Key Features to Provide an Exceptional Customer Experience in Retail

Here’s the good news. 

You are entirely in control of the customer experience that you provide. You cannot control the competition or wage a price war, but you can definitely offer a positive customer experience. 

So, what is an excellent customer experience? 

There is no such thing called the right customer experience. It varies from retailer to retailer and depends on your products, stores, and customers. 

How to Improve Customer Experience in Retail Stores?

Technology helps retailers connect with their customers in new and exciting ways. 

1. Structure Your Promotions around Future Purchases

Your systems should allow you to capture customers’ purchase history, which would enable you to predict their future purchases. 

This would allow you to be proactive in your promotions. You can send out your promotions via email, telephone, and automated messages based on this prediction. Your conversions most likely will go up. 

For this, your contact center platform will have to be tightly integrated with your CRM system. 

2. Seek Feedback from Your Customers

Once the customer makes a purchase, collect the customer feedback through automated voice messaging or live chat tools in real-time. This would allow you to directly log in to the CRM system, which is tightly integrated with the contact center platform. 

Focus your feedback queries on actionable inputs that you can seek from your customers to improve their overall experience. Once you implement their suggestions, thank them for the suggestions and let them know they have been acted upon. 

3. Provide Options for Your Customer to Reach You

Your customer wants to reach you to complain about a faulty product. As it is, they are concerned that the product is defective. Imagine, if you make them stay on hold in trying to reach an agent, it will make the experience worse than it is. 

That would be the last thing that you would want to do. 

Provide them multiple ways by which your customers can reach you. If the customer wants to return the purchase, provide them with a simple option on your mobile app or website to click a link and process the return. For a complex query, offer them easy ways to reach your agents without waiting. 

Please provide them with self-service options to address transactional questions like shipping information, time of delivery, etc. 

4. Incentivize Great Customer Experiences

Every time your customer experience resource wow your customers, get them to document them. Any experience that is beyond the ordinary is what should be documented. I am sure that you would have at least half-a-dozen such experiences every week from across your customer experience function. These would act as a great starting point to think beyond the ordinary. 

Incentivize every such documented experience. 

5. Deploy Analytics Effectively

Run every customer conversation through your analytics platform, whether text or voice. Pick out the customer’s positive and negative emotions, identify the red flags, and proactively work on them. 

Once you remove the bottlenecks identified by the analytics platform, make the changes a part of your positioning & messaging and actively promote them. 

Customer expectations are higher than ever now, and word of mouth travels faster than anything. Customer experience is an area that requires a lot of care and attention. I have covered here only from the contact center platform’s perspective. To provide an exceptional customer experience, you will have to look at the complete customer journey.