“Global online retail sales are expected to reach $6.5 trillion by end of 2023 with the eCommerce website covering 22.3% of total retail sales.”
Being one of the fastest growing and highly competitive, the Retail industry is experiencing an industry-wide change in terms of end-user shopping and customer experience. The growing demand for online shopping pushes the retail industry to adopt digital transformation. With the end-customer in mind, the term “Customer Experience” is shaping the overall customer journey. Delighting the customers has been the predominant task for retail businesses once the shift happened.
Having said that, only a few number of retailers have been able to stand out in the customer experience competition that drives revenue and customers to your retail store.
But why only a few?
Why haven’t a lot of retail brands been able to enter into the Customer Experience bandwagon and become the leading retail brand with superior buying experience? It’s not a big secret followed by big brands like Coca-cola or Amazon! But it’s certainly one of the most challenging factors in order to deliver a great customer experience consistently.
Retail’s Digital Customer Experience is Evolving
“The technology age swings in both ways – there’s a lot of data available that helps customers and more data available about them, their behavior, and shopping habits.”
Digital retail is all about convenience, journey, and understanding the data. The digital customer experience (CX) is becoming the biggest differentiator for retail in terms of brand and revenue generator. A massive 86% of shoppers are willing to pay more for a better personalized and better customer experience. There’s a lot to discuss about the challenges in retail to maximize CX. Here it goes.
Not Taking the Retail Business Omnichannel
Consumers’ growing use of messaging applications created a new trend for customer communication and shopping as well. Customers expect retailers and brands to deliver retail-related services through multiple communication channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram Messenger, and more.
Retailers have to create a single and unified communication platform that offers personalized and holistic customer experience management from the initial journey to the buying stage.
No Better Understanding of Customers
Understanding the customers’ overall activity has become an integral issue for the retail industry. It’s not that you learn who your customers are but also the buying habits that dynamically changes based on technology upgrade. Keeping up with your customer’s preferences is a significant factor to increase retention rate. A slight increase in customer retention rate such as 5% can directly increase your retail profits by 25% to 95%.
Insufficient Customer-centric Approach
For decades, buying decision has been more or less carried out based on price and product. But with today’s digital buying journey, customers expect a personalized approach across every interaction and journey. Some retailers believe a product-centric approach delivers the expected number which can be applied for the short-term, though, in the long run, the figures will certainly increase.
Inadequate Customer Engagement
How your customers feel about shopping from your online retail store depends on how well they are engaged with your brand. Most retailers are finding it challenging to balance subtle customer engagement. Poor customer engagement can lead to dissatisfied customers, low sales growth, degraded loyalty, and more. Answering your customers’ queries, gathering customer feedback, offering discounts, product recommendations, and delivering a self-service experience can help to engage your audience better.
Technological Upgradation
Most retailers understand the significance of unifying customer experience across all channels, but quite a lot of them are facing technical challenges. Retailers are still deploying outdated technology which needs to be replaced in order to create a unified and omnichannel customer experience.
Beyond online retail apps, customers prefer more efficient ways to shop. Messaging application is the new replacement for online retail apps. Retailers have to blend customer experience with product indulgence across messaging channels to stay ahead in the competitive market.
Demand for Omnichannel Customer Service
Efficient customer service is one of the notable factors that decide your retail business value and ROI. Continuous support and connection for customers between all your channels are termed to be omnichannel support. It means that your customers can meet your support team across all communication channels seamlessly with the full context of the issue or order history. Your customers need not re-explain the issue or anything related to orders that they’ve already explained to another team member.
Slow Response Time
Customers are increasingly demanding quick and immediate responses or resolutions to their issues or queries. Delivering quick and accurate responses through the traditional channel is quite costly and inefficient for a large number of queries. In order to reduce operational costs, improve response time and maximize customer service/satisfaction, retailer businesses must deploy or upgrade to a technological solution that automates customer service right from the initial journey.
Handling Resources
Instead of directly involving their resources completely in customer service activities, that follows outdated technologies and insufficient infrastructure leads, they can concentrate on other functional activity that requires a human touch. The overall customer experience operations can be automated with a Conversational AI bot specifically designed for online retails and eCommerce. The outdated technology will result in lower profit margins, higher operational costs, and an unsatisfied customer experience.
Opportunity – Overcome Customer Experience Challenges in Online Retail using Twixor’s Customer Experience Automation Platform
“Nearly ⅔ of buyers expect an immediate response within 10 minutes to any sales, marketing, and service-related request.”
The described challenges for the retail and e-commerce industry can be solved by using an all-in-one platform, a solution built with the combination of Conversational AI & NLP.
Meet Twixor – an Intelligent CX automation platform that helps retailers to enhance customer experience, sales, marketing, and overall business value through deploying customized journey flows across messaging channels.
Twixor platform empowers online retail businesses to deliver an omnichannel buying journey to customers by building journey flows equipped with personalized features.
The Retailers can create an NLP-powered Self AI Assistant that acts as a solution provider, enhance product recommendation and automate end-to-end customer fulfillment.
Who Typically Needs To Implement Twixor’s Conversational AI Bot in Their Online Retail Business?
- The retail business that receives overwhelming customer requests and phone calls. Due to this, their overall customer satisfaction rate dropped dramatically.
- Brands struggling to automate customer service-related operations like making a delivery request, tracking shipments, order corrections, and more.
- Retail brands that focus on scaling marketing efforts by reaching targeted users right on their WhatsApp or any other messaging channel. Brands wish to run targeted campaigns to personalize offerings, product recommendations, and more.
- Retail businesses find it challenging to onboard customers, collect details, predict demand forecasting, generate new leads, and more.
Start Listening to Your Customers Today to Stay Ahead in the Retail Competitive Market
A right technology or solution can personalize the retailer-customer interaction. Personalized interaction can strike a hold on customer experience. The importance of CX in retail can’t be overstated because if a retailer fails to improve CX will fail to grow. With the implementation of Conversational AI in retail & e-commerce can help to simplify the entire shopping journey from initial browsing to after-sales service.
By investing into an NLP-powered retail chatbot can drive higher conversions, maximize customer satisfaction, reduce operational & marketing costs, enhance brand reputation, and reap ROI.
