Strategic Customer Experience Priorities in Retail

Over the last two years, customer habits, behaviors, and preferences have changed drastically. Having a frictionless customer experience has become more critical than ever before. Customers expect everything to be digitally accessible; they want their questions to be answered instantly and don’t want to wait too long for refunds. What priorities must companies set to achieve these high levels of customer engagement and satisfaction?

Main customer experience priorities

During the discussion, different attendees shared their top customer experience priorities for 2022. A director of IT said that they have just launched a campaign which would allow their customers to experience what it’s like to consume their products. A CIO added that their biggest goal for 2022 is to tackle the rising supply chain issues and ensure timely shipments. A CEO mentioned that they have developed a new website and are working to refine their Omni-channel strategy. Some other priorities were as follows:

• Reduce friction faced by customers— both before and after making a purchase.
• Add self-service to various customer touch points.
• Add more personalization to customer experiences.
• Better understand the customers.
• Frictionless mobile commerce (as almost 60% of traffic now comes via mobile devices).
• Build better automation that can help enhance customer experience, while reducing the number of agents in the call center.

Unified commerce

A participant talked about their goal to implement true unified commerce (UC), i.e., systems for inventory, customer management, shipping, payments, etc., integrated via a single platform. This will enable them to enhance customer experience by providing features like touchless transactions, convenient returns, and seamless multichannel shopping. However, achieving UC can be complex if you have legacy systems. For example, your marketing automation system that’s running in the cloud may have a hard time integrating with your in-house ERP system, running on a legacy mainframe.

Modern approaches to enhance customer experience

An executive recounted how they refined their return policy to enhance customer experience significantly. They launched a return portal where customers could request the return themselves, get the label printed, and then ship the package back to the company. But they were still getting a lot of emails from frustrated customers about delays in refund processing. To reduce this friction, they integrated with the logistics company and started tracking the package in real-time. As soon as the logistics company received the package from the customer, they refunded the customer without checking what was in the package. This approach got the money back to the customer much faster, which made them a lot happier. A few people abused this approach (by returning junk instead of the actual product), but overall, they noticed a vast improvement in customer experience.  

They also implemented chatbots on their website, which can answer not only simple questions like, “where is your store?” or “what time do you open?” but also relatively complicated questions like, “can you help me return this product?” or “Can you recommend me a pair of shoes based on XYZ preferences?”

‍