EDV

A stellar customer experience has a measurable impact on your bottom line. How do you deliver this in the retail industry which has its own set of challenges?

In part one of our discussion, we will look at the current retail landscape and how to overcome retail challenges.

The current retail landscape

A positive experience can play a strong role in influencing the purchasing process and ultimately a shopper’s decision to buy. It’s no surprise then that businesses are devoting more attention and resources to improving the customer journey. Getting it right, however, means correctly identifying which aspects of the experience their customers value most. Top among them these aspects are speed, convenience and knowledge. Customers also expect to engage with your company on any device or network. Every attempt to connect must be smooth, informative and reliable. Retailers also want to be able to control costs and applications as well as how and when they can communicate with their customers. A feature-rich phone system and cloud communications allow businesses to reimagine the way they respond to customer requests and deliver goods and services.

Overcoming retail challenges

Your employees are busy answering the phones while in-store customers are waiting for assistance; will customers leave the store without making a purchase?

Simple call routing allows questions relating to opening hours, store locations and job application requests to be routed to call announcements. This ensures store staff are free to assist purchasing customers.

Store Managers need to solicit, discuss and distribute daily or weekly updates concerning important store updates on stock levels, sales figures, stock recalls and promotions. How do you keep everyone informed?

Audio conferencing enables highly cost-effective and extremely flexible conferencing between remote locations removing the need for expensive outsourced conferencing costs.

Your in-store staff are mobile and need to ensure they can be contacted by customers and colleagues. How do you avoid them having to return to a checkout or the customer service desk to take a call?

Using a wide variety of telephone handsets including SIP, IP-DECT or incorporating a smartphone twinned with a deskphone means staff are never out of touch when walking around a store.

You are targeted with reducing IT costs and simplifying administration associated with communications.

A reliable phone system will provide a complete suite of productivity-enhancing tools out of the box as standard. This reduces installation, maintenance and ongoing administration while also ensuring valuable store space is not wasted on providing room for large amounts of servers.

Customer loyalty and customer attraction is a critical success factor with specific targets associated with call answering.

Formal or informal contact centres can be set-up and simply administered to better route calls and provide intelligent information about expected wait times or position in queues.

Customers demand fast, personalised service in every channel.

To remain competitive, exceptional customer experience via telephone, chat, social media and self-service is a must.

The phone still counts.

Customers frequently prefer to speak with live humans to untangle issues, which means call centers need to be at continuous, peak efficiency.

Weak links aren’t welcome in the supply chain.

Any breakdown in communications with suppliers, distributors and other vendors ultimately impacts customer relationships and brand reputation.

Proactive businesses win and keep more customers.

Automation anticipates customer needs more efficiently, for example, by letting customers know a product is in-stock before they drive to the store.

It all starts and ends with human interaction. The right technology combined with better employee training can help companies improve their interactions. Together, people and cloud communications technology are the best investments a business can make to deliver a smarter, faster and more convenient customer experience. Essential Data and Voice have over 25 years of experience in designing and delivering robust communications solutions, partnering with companies of all sizes. We provide end-to-end managed services, working closely with our clients to provide a truly unique solution.

Stay tuned for part two in this series – we will be looking at 5 questions every retailers should ask when it comes to their communications solutions. We’ll also look at how the right communications can drive results.