Retailers across the UK emerge from 2021 having navigated an incredibly uncertain and unpredictable year – 2022 promises to be no different.
Managing operational costs, brand reputations and profit margins will be front of mind, all set in the wider context of optimising journeys to ensure the best possible customer experiences.
Help is at hand though. In this article, Vanessa Flather, Retail sector MD for Webhelp UK, takes us through three hot topics that retailers should be looking out for, in order to improve their retail customer experience in 2022.
1. The voice of the customer has never been more important.
With NPS and CSAT, retailers get a sense of how their customers are feeling about their products and services but innovative retailers want more than this.
By truly listening to customers, challenging themselves to better understand their customers’ needs, and by embracing the wealth of data available from their front-line, real-time customer interactions, retailers can deliver a holistic, transformative and innovative brand and customer experience.
2. Personalisation
Retailers are making good progress in the area of personalisation, but there’s still a long way to go. Our recent Yougov poll showed that less than half of consumers, particularly those aged over 55, felt that retailers were targeting them with relevant discounts and products. Forward-thinking retailers will use the data available from Voice of the Customer to deliver tailored, relevant products and services that will delight their customers.
3. Insight-driven returns optimisation
The maintenance of a robust, seamless returns journey has never been more important to the overall customer experience – get the returns journey wrong, and all your hard-earned brand experience, NPS and customer satisfaction scores are at risk.
As a result, the impact to retailers themselves is very real. There’s the volume of employees needed to manage the process, the warehouse space, the cost of the associated postage and packing – all before we even consider the environmental impact.
Whether it is gaining a deeper understanding of the root cause of customer returns, or adopting new technologies to enable better “right first time purchasing”, the retailers who best understand their returns process – and their customers’ motivations – will be the ones who win in what has become a multi-million-pound industry in its own right.
At Webhelp, we have a number of solutions to support retailers and their operation, from peak demand management, to customer journey optimisation, utilising analytics-driven customer insights and more.
If it sounds like we could provide a solution for you, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
