Retail customer experience is the sum of all interactions a customer has with your brand. In retail, this means everything from shopping your store, to calling your contact center, to researching products on your website, to looking for deals in your app. Every interaction must work in tandem to deliver an exceptional experience.
Of course, a great retail CX strategy is not just reactive, it’s proactive too. Having the ability to get ahead of your customers — their questions, their pain points, and their next best actions — is quickly becoming the cornerstone of any modern, proactive retail experience strategy. Not only do these proactive approaches to CX help reduce the burden placed on the contact center, but they more closely align with the expectations of the modern customer. Fortunately, the retail industry is now equipped with tools to understand customers’ behaviors, expectations, desires, and feedback — regardless of where they are in their journey.
Create a Cohesive Experience Across Channels
In an effort to align retail customer experiences with the unique preferences of the modern retail customer, omnichannel experiences will continue to become more prevalent. If your omnichannel strategy isn’t comprehensive, your customers will suffer unneeded confusion and frustration — and your employees will too.
Architect an Omnichannel Customer Journey
Your customers expect to interact with your brand wherever and whenever they want. The better you understand and architect all of those moments, the better your overall customer experience.
For retailers to truly modernize and perfect the customer journey, you need to look at this journey as a harmonious, synchronized experience that does not begin or end with each individual channel or interaction. Omnichannel customer journeys achieve this goal by creating an integrated approach to customer engagement that focuses on enabling customers to navigate a singular customer journey through a variety of channels – including the physical store, social media, the web, phone, text chat, and more.
Evolve with an Omnichannel Customer Engagement Model
Before making a sudden leap into a modernized omnichannel strategy, step back to consider where you stand now. By taking an honest, objective look at where you are succeeding and where you’re falling short, you’ll be better poised to make the needed decisions and improvements without adding unnecessary complexity.
A proper omnichannel strategy is driven by a customer-centric analytics model that is constantly collecting and applying feedback and data from every engagement channel. Cycling these insights back into your overall CX strategy creates an agile, adaptive customer engagement model that is informed by data and in a constant state of improvement.
Launch a Commerce Experience that is Truly Omnichannel
E-commerce is a focal point in the broader omnichannel strategy, but a true omnichannel experience goes far beyond this one component. Service and interaction channels, social channels, and numerous other touchpoints are all a part of a holistic digital engagement model.
In omnichannel, consistency, connectivity, and ease of use are necessities. If an omnichannel experience is creating confusion and additional hurdles for the customer, it’s doing more harm than good. Every channel must work together seamlessly to create a predictable and enjoyable experience.
Omnichannel commerce is dependent on an effective, seamless implementation. While its offerings can be your greatest asset, they can also create additional weaknesses if they’re sloppily implemented.