Modern contact center brings personalization in retail

With online shopping retail business experiences the era of prosperity.  Buyers can find all the shops in the area of their palm. The shops travel with them anywhere anytime and provide goods at their door porch.  With these conditions, it became extremely simple to find interested customers almost anywhere in the world. But with great opportunities comes a huge competition too. While you can come up with a revolutionary product that sells itself, the newest customers’ survey states that 80% of customers think that experience the company provides is as important as the product itself. If you want to get on the train with this 80 %, it’s the right moment to consider how the customers are feeling while engaging with your business. Here you won’t be the only one too since as Allan Thygesen, the president of the Americas states “Assistance is the new battleground for growth”.

So how to get the right weapons for not to bleed in the enormous arena of online businesses? The retail trends of 2020 published by Microsoft underline the importance of personalization. Personalization is everywhere right now. Sometimes it delights other times frightens. But it seems that the customers are warming up with the idea of their data usage for sales if it will result in a better product or experience. Research finds that the majority of them would provide more personal data, to get better customer experience. 

Personalization, as well as customer experience, are both the concepts highly associated with technologies. But sometimes these two can step in the ways of each other.  Remember the ads offering you to buy another identical table after you just purchased it? Just in case you will lose the first one! While following new trends of communication through different channels (and catching up with customers’ needs), is causing difficulty in collecting all the data for proper personalization. 

More knowledge about customers brings a higher understanding of their needs, but only when your information is working for you. Despite awareness gained from purchase history, loyalty membership or online browsing a lot of useful insights can be lost in many little drawers of information. This not only robs your customers from the best service they can get but also aggravates the company’s infrastructure this way causing in errors, and again, service not so fluent as it can be.

So how modern technology can help you not only grow your customers’ experience but enter the game of personalization too?

It helps you to save time and customer nerves

Remember the period when all companies started to shift to IVR systems trying to control customer flow? Long, complicated audio recordings caused many customers’ frustration. It did not work. Complete automation is not the solution while expecting the team to do all the jobs with a lot of information can be difficult and time-consuming. The way out of the problem can be offered by contact centers. Empowering live agents with software advantages can make them react faster to customers’ needs. 

It lets you take all the advantages of your data

Retail business has a lot of information but is not optimizing its usage. According to research, 52 % of companies have difficulties connecting all the data they have in different parts of their organization (link idn). Plenty of indications about their shoppers, local stores, and trends are lost in the storage corners. If all the information could be collected in one place and summarized in statistics the company not only had a 360 view of customers, shops and tendencies regarded to location for better evaluation but would even initiate trends that would but them on the top of their niche. That is what high-class retail businesses are doing right now. We all understand that information is everything. But only the successful ones are connecting dots and making the use of it. 

Chatbots frees your support agents

This revolutionary technology can answer up to 80% percent of simple, repetitive questions. Natural language processing can create a wonderful experience of a rich conversation. The chatbot does not operate alone, but it includes the agent only when needed. To learn more about how the chatbot can be useful for the retail business you can read here (link to the page).

 

It rises CX

If the customer is connected to the right agent there is a higher possibility the customer will have a pleasant experience. Contact centers provide call routing this way ensuring that the agent has the most competence to solve a certain problem. But having competence is not everything. The solution can lay somewhere in the database. When the customer service agent has all the information about previous customer chats with the bot, purchases and past problems, he can find a solution much faster. While this is a big step forward, most innovative companies adopt the practice of foreseeing support and notifying the customers that they will be in need soon, and here is what to do.