With the evolution of buyers behavior, the retail industry has experienced a drastic change. Customers of the digital age need more than comfort to stick to a brand. Customers are continuously being exposed to new and innovative retail experiences which is urging them to search for new service providers. In order to stay ahead of competition, retailers must use proactive methods and techniques for connecting with customers.
Retailers are spending huge amount of money on their website for driving traffic to increase sales but at the same time are ignoring the importance of their customer service departments. Customer service departments are the backbone of any organization aiming towards customer centricity. After all, sales service and customer service are the two major pillars of any retail organization. Thus optimizing the retail experience should be the core focus of these companies. This can only be achieved by enabling the service department with a smart customer engagement technology for creating seamless interactions across all touchpoints.
From the business perspective, the retail brands have to ensure that the cost to service for each customer is reduced and thus the business profit margins are protected. To maintain the margins, the retail brands need to identify the challenges being faced by their service departments. Here, I have listed down few challenges that retail brands are facing in servicing their customers:
1. Process Automation
The number of customers who are being serviced on a daily basis are increasing tremendously. This has lead to an explosion of contact instances resulting to customer dissatisfaction if the customer service agents don’t handle the situation smartly. There might also be a situation when there is huge customer traffic. Thus, process automation can be a simple solution to all the unanswered questions. Routine activities like service bookings, service reminders, status updation, etc., can be dealt through complete automation.
2. Customer Identification
When the customer call for service bookings and queries, manual interaction makes the complete process lengthy and tedious. The agent has to then put the customer on hold and go through the entire customer details for confirming his booking and identity. This creates a hassle in the normal process resulting to more unsatisfied demands and potential human errors. Thus introducing the retail call center software can be an additive advantage for the entire system as it will reduce the new and additional workload. At the same time will also ensure improved efficiency of the entire workforce.
3. Predictive Analysis
Taking successful business decisions has always been a challenge for the management. Thus, with the help of Predictive analysis retail organizations can take informed decisions for the future. It is one of the effective ways for predicting future probabilities and trends. The contact center software will capture the important data that can be used by the agents in understanding the problem areas which will be beneficial in taking important decisions for:
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Stock planning with the help of demand forecasting
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Evaluating customer conversion and churn to increase the customer lifetime
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Identifying the prospective customer base for campaigns
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Increasing the productivity of human resources
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Helping gain agility to respond to any changes in the market condition
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Increasing the efficiency of in-store customer service
4. Buying Behaviour pattern
Tracking the trends of consumer buying behaviour has been a major challenge for retail organizations. Using the existing interaction data captured through CRM can help in providing real-time analytics about the buying pattern of the customers. Through this, organizations can target the right market which will fundamentally change the way businesses are taking decisions. Customer speech and text interactions can be captured through the retail call center software. The captured data can be used to go beyond traditional servicing programs for having an in-depth knowledge of customers. This will develop a granular understanding of segment behavior, needs and expectations; buying preferences; and opportunities to attract new prospects.
5. Cross-sell and up-sell
One of the major challenges that retail organizations are facing today is about creating awareness of their newly launched products. But, with the help of a smart customer engagement technology, retail organizations can simplify their interactions and can enrich existing customer relationships to retain them for a lifetime. Customer service agents can use the existing customer base data for up-selling and cross-selling their products and can also promote next-best offers that your customer most likely wants.
With evolving trends and technological anomalies, retail call center softwares are equipped to overcome the hitches in customer service and operational processes of retail companies.
