The holiday shopping season is over! The pandemic seemingly never will be. And customers around the world are ready for a new normal as the new year begins. After two years of living in a pandemic, we find ourselves wondering how things were and vowing to never go back to the life before Covid. Attending live events and venues? Yes, please. Without a mask? Um, no, never, not with the virus still doing its turns. Shopping, in-person? Check! But without a six feet distance between you and the person behind you? Hard pass.
As a result, retailers find themselves in a tough spot. They’ve bent over backward to comply with various regulations. They have also modified their entire business models to stay afloat throughout the crisis. And they’re still expected to keep innovating and modifying to appeal to a customer base whose preferences change rapidly. Nowadays, retail brands need personalized messages (preferably on all possible communication channels,) contactless check-in/check-out systems, curbside pickup facilities, and so on.
Today, brands that provide superior (and Covid friendly) retail customer support are the ones that get recognized. They need to provide these experiences all the way while they face a global supply chain logjam and staffing shortages. It’s a lot to process. But it is also a huge opportunity for brands who know how to execute this gracefully. So the question goes;
- How do you do it gracefully? How do you ensure that your services are simple, fast, secure, and are tailored to exactly what your customers want?
Here are some best practices that will help you further answer this question and improve your retail customer experience.
1. Identify Your Best Consumers
Pointing out the difference between fraudsters and legitimate customers is a huge challenge for many online retailers. This has to be done without disrupting your customer’s shopping experience. Leveraging the right technology tools, data, marketing strategies, multi-factor authentication, etc., can optimize your business’s ability to the customer. It can help you identify which customer is going to stay with your brand and which one is not.
Retail brands can fine-tune their targeting efforts by using customer identity data to get a 360-degree view of their purchase behavior over time. Using the same tools and data across multiple channels expands a business’s reach. This approach also saves time maximizes the return for your marketing spend and the precision of targeting efforts.
2. Adopt Multiple Channels For Online Shopping
Today’s average customer frequently toggles between multiple communication channels like phones, computers, tablets, and other devices. They usually refrain from visiting the stores physically for general queries and complaints. They also tend to use various online channels ranging from social media to email and Whatsapp text.
This highly connected customer is accustomed to starting their buying journey on one device and then continuing it from another device and checking out from an entirely different device. These customers expect a smooth and consistent experience across all devices and channels. Meanwhile, they also expect brands to communicate with them about any information that could affect their online shopping experience, such as changes in delivery date and times, shipping options, offers, and so on. These customers also want to be assured that their data stays safe and secure across different devices. Hence, it is crucial for online retailers to create a cohesive experience by leveraging the right retail ticketing software.
3. Personalize Offers That Caters to Specific Customers
This exercise is important to create loyal customers out of your business. Offers must be personalized and relevant for specific and targeted customer segments. This segmentation should be done accurately; otherwise, you might see your online sales numbers suffer. Here, understanding your audience will enable you to steer them in the right direction.
Build smarter audience segments and group them according to their unique needs. This will ultimately improve your ability to address each customer’s requirements and will improve the entire online consumer journey.
4. Analytics To Serve Personalized Experience
Using predictive analytics and reporting tools can also improve your ability to provide personalized experiences. It can also help your business capitalize on the rising spikes in digital commerce. This way, you’ll be more apt to increase the likelihood of seeing customers spending more time on your site, adding more items to their online shopping cart, completing their transactions, and building greater loyalty with your brand.
Ensure that your retail ticketing software has robust analytics and reporting tools that let you keep a 360-degree view of everything. The right retail ticketing software will help you look at the entire customer persona and their journey through a single, consolidated dashboard. The agent providing support to a particular customer can take decisions as per the customer’s history. An ideal retail ticketing software brings the data and the query interface together to enable the agent to view everything from one place. This enables full-context customer support and eventually better customer experiences.
5. Protect Customer Identity and Financial Information
Data breaches have become more frequent in the past two years than ever. With more consumers shopping online, fraudsters find new ways to capitalize on the data crisis. Besides, publicity and news pertaining to data breaches can scare away customers who may never return. Hence, the biggest challenge lies in figuring out how to prevent your customers from this.
Ask yourself these key questions:
- What type of fraud and cybersecurity processes are in trend?
- Is your business immune to such threats? If not, then why is it not?
- What type of device intelligence exists?
- What mechanism do you have to detect fraudulent activities?
- Is your retail ticketing software safe?
- Is your customer support data safe?
Once you have answers to these questions, you’ll know if your retail business is safe or not. Even if it’s not, you’ll know what steps to take further after answering these questions.
6. Use The Latest Retail Ticketing Software
In the retail industry, repetitive customers are crucial to keeping the business afloat irrespective of the niche. Delighted customers are a key to the success of a retail business. Customers will get frustrated if not provided with a satisfactory and quick response. Here’s when the retail helpdesk software comes into the picture. Here are some absolute must-have features of retail ticketing software:
I. Collecting and Processing Customer Data
One of the primary challenges of retail businesses is gathering feedback and later on processing that information to build a sound workflow. A robust retail helpdesk software lets you do just this. It helps agents and support teams deliver satisfying and gratifying customer experiences. It helps businesses manage data flawlessly.
II. Manage Inquiries and Return Requests
Support teams are often flooded with purchase inquiries related to offers, cost, features, and so on. Then comes the post-sales queries and return requests too. With retail ticketing software, you can respond to these queries in a timely manner and as per the priorities. You can also have FAQs and knowledge base articles dedicated to returns and orders.
III. Manage Supplier/Merchant Communications
Bridging the communication gap between suppliers, vendors and distributors is important in retail businesses. Vendor communication has never been easier. A retail ticketing software can process this for you. It can initiate this communication in the form of tickets, and the concerned staff can address this later on. It can help your agents collaborate in order to address your supply needs efficiently. Everyone involved in the supply chain process can communicate through the same ticket.
IV. Manage Omni Channel Communication
With retail ticketing software, you’ll never struggle with managing omnichannel communication again. It brings together queries from all support channels and lets your agents manage them from a single interface.
V. Automation Features
A retail helpdesk software enables automated ticketing processes and provides accountability. It helps you reduce manual work by taking care of ticketing tasks like:
- Ticket registering
- Converting emails/chats/messages to tickets
- Ticket assigning and allocation as per agent expertise
- Feedback collection
- Sending welcome emails
- Keeping track of ticket workflow
- Sending ticket updates
- Manage agent roles and responsibilities
VI. Structured Knowledge Base
A streamlined, well-structured self-help tool never hurt anybody! Adopt various customer self-help tools like knowledge base, web-FAQs, and so on. Pick a retail helpdesk tool that lets you serve customers with instant answers to simple problems without having to wait for support agents to respond. On the other hand, support agents can also add repetitive questions to the knowledge base articles through this feature.
The Bottomline
Having an in-depth understanding of your consumer’s needs makes the path to success. Delivering a smooth journey (primarily digitally) for the customer is the key. This includes being able to ensure that your customer’s personal and financial data stays safe across every order and interaction. Make sure you have the right retail ticketing software at your mercy. A robust retail ticketing software comes with all the features mentioned above. Do not settle for anything less! The right retail ticketing software will continue to pay dividends and will keep your customers intact. Your customers will remain intact now and in the future.
