The Future of Retail: Touchless Customer Engagement

As brands rapidly rethink their digital-first consumer experiences — brilliant customer engagement means tangible results.

Today’s consumers want three things: effortless experiences, contactless payment options, and personalized content and offers. Shopper behavior has dramatically changed due to the pandemic, forcing retailers of all sizes to adapt business models and better embrace touchless services. Accordingly, it has become essential for retailers to adopt touchless engagement strategies for improving everything from employee productivity to customer lifetime value.

This is where omnichannel customer engagement solutions come into play, and with Infobip and PubNub, you can build engaging touchless experiences that increase customer satisfaction and revenue.

Touchless customer engagement provides a wealth of consumer data that can influence how vendors can engage, market, upsell, and incent customers to remain loyal to your brand. As customers of all ages go mobile – a solid app experience means you can learn a lot about your customer’s needs and get closer to them. The engaged connected consumer is your best customer.

Touchless engagement can include:

Touchless convenience and fueling: Make a reservation for electronic charging, or fuel selection, and payment can be handled within the app. Achieve a fully contactless sale, pairing the app with a designated attendant who can remove the need for customers to come into contact with the pump.

Contactless shopping, dining, and grocery: Decrease human interaction by making browsing catalogs, menus, ordering, delivery, and payment digital. Stores can offer full e-commerce ordering and payment or a hybrid approach enabling in-store appointment booking, self-directed checkout, and payment.

Getting chatty with chatbots: Customers have become accustomed to communicating with robots all the time via chatbots, automated SMS messages, and even Alexa. For consumers, being able to interact with keyword-driven chatbots via channels like WhatsApp or SMS means that many of the answers they need from a customer service perspective are available in a matter of moments – for example, a store’s opening hours or a delivery update. Then, in the instance where a more personalized, human response is needed, their inquiry can be seamlessly escalated to an agent.

Timely feedback: Modern messaging also provides a perfect platform for customer feedback. Using WhatsApp, customers can quickly get in touch about late deliveries or unsatisfactory orders. With swift action, this will then minimize the likelihood of customers taking to social media to complain about a service. Messaging also helps manage and coordinate delivery fleets to ensure optimal pickup and delivery times, so everything runs smoothly.

The long-term impact of touchless engagement in customer experience means putting in place technologies and processes that allow customers to choose their preferred communication channels and whether or not they want to opt-in or opt-out of human interaction.

By incorporating Infobip and PubNub into your application, you can give your customers the choice over how they can want to engage—be it through chat, voice, or other virtual experiences.

Ultimately, empowering customers with choice over how they want to connect, collaborate, and engage helps to build trust and is key to establishing long-term customer relationships.

About PubNub: PubNub is a developer platform that powers the infrastructure in your app to build engaging Virtual Spaces for your community to connect. They make it easy to create custom in-app features, like chat, notifications, real-time updates, geolocation, and IoT device control, with built-in reliability and scalability. Their platform handles your backend so you don’t need to worry about outages, latency, or concurrency limitations and can free up your roadmap to focus on your core product and users.