How to Accelerate Customer Experience Transformation in Retail

Customer experience transformation will be essential as retailers navigate a post-pandemic world. Here’s how tech consultancies can help retail clients to transform faster and unlock sustainable business growth.

The global pandemic will go down as a “big bang” moment in retail customer experience transformation. And for good reason.

Changing consumer behaviors and the mass shift to digital channels were already in motion. But COVID-19 lit the fuse, igniting change at unimaginable speed.

This overnight transformation – which McKinsey coined “a decade in days” – saw retailers pivot to new business models like D2C and subscriptions and rapidly launch and scale digital customer experiences.

And it’s far from over.

As consumer behaviors continue to change – and digital technologies play a growing role in all aspects of our lives – digital customer experience (CX) will become an even bigger brand differentiator and revenue generator (today, a massive 86% of shoppers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience).

That’s why digital CX transformation initiatives will remain a business imperative as retailers strive to continually improve the customer experience and provide ongoing value to shoppers as their expectations change.

Consultancies and systems integrators have a key role to play here in:

Many partner with us to accelerate their retail clients’ transformation into high-performance, customer-centric, data-driven businesses.

Here are three common challenges we tackle together along the way.

Customers want a personalized and tailored shopping experience where retail brands demonstrate a strong understanding of their needs and individual context, adding value every step of the customer journey (whatever shape that journey takes).

But a massive 74% of shoppers still see disjointed, depersonalized communications from brands. These impersonal messages are the reason why more than 1 in 5 people switched brand allegiance during the COVID-19 lockdown.

The main culprits for poor customer experiences are siloed customer data and independently managed digital channels.

They make it impossible to achieve a centralized view of the digital customer experience and to implement an omnichannel customer engagement strategy – which is essential for providing personalized, contextual experiences at scale.

Your retail clients need to provide personalization at scale across every touchpoint to improve conversion, retention, marketing ROI, revenue, and more.

Retailers need to accelerate their transformation from multichannel retailers into omnichannel, customer-centric organizations.

Unifying data and customer communications in this way is essential for becoming a customer-centric retailer and transforming customer interactions into meaningful connections.

Customer loyalty is big business (increasing retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%). But every point of friction and added customer effort makes it harder to retain customers and nurture lasting relationships.

Customer service is both a critical customer touchpoint and a key point of friction, with almost a third (31%) of shoppers frustrated at the limited ways and times they can contact a company.

Slow and reactive customer service, a lack of customer insight, and the inability to scale communication channels rapidly compromise loyalty and the experiences a retailer can offer.

Your retail clients want to minimize the customer effort required to connect, share proactive support, and provide an always-on digital experience across every channel and context – to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

With unified customer conversations and centralized data, retailers have the tools to evolve the contact center into a revenue-generator, capturing customer insights which can be used across the entire organization.

Customer experience transformation in retail is a business imperative, but retailers are also facing economic uncertainty, extremely tight margins, and rapidly changing market dynamics. What’s more, 73% of digital transformations fail to deliver business value.

Simply investing in CX tech doesn’t guarantee success. So retailers need to ensure early and sustainable return on every digital investment and transformation initiative.

Your retail clients want to understand their options so that they can prioritize digital investments based on their ability to impact the business goals.

Our technologies help retailers of all types to accelerate their customer experience transformation and make meaningful customer connections that deliver business impact.

Our open and flexible solutions provide the key ingredients for customer experience transformation in retail:

Talk to us today about accelerating your clients’ digital transformation programs with an Infobip partnership.