Finding the Retail Sweet Spot: Combining Hyper-Personalized Customer Service and Experience

Retailers today need to deliver a customer experience that’s seamless, relevant, authentic, omnichannel – and hyper-personalized.

Marketing leaders are well aware of this. They know that intelligent 1:1 conversations allow them to use the right, customized message or offer at the right time, yielding better results. Retailers that deploy advanced personalization, for example, see a consistent 25% revenue increase.

There is an opportunity for forward-thinking retailers to go even further by taking advantage of the function that already routinely has 1:1 interactions with their customers: their customer service.

But this requires giving customer service agents the tools and data they need to become an integrated, unified part of the customer experience. So what’s the most effective way for retailers to empower their customer service teams?

In this blog, we outline the way forward.

Journey Map the End-To-End Experience

Customers choose how and when they interact with retailers: in-store, online, or through social media or other channels, and either pre-, during, or post-purchase.

That means retailers need to understand the customer’s experience and perspective at each one of these points, as well as across the entire journey.

Leading retailers map the end-to-end customer journey, aiming to identify and manage problems and reduce friction points. This exercise also ensures retailers can prioritize customer service across the journey to improve the overall experience for shoppers.

Making customer service a fundamental part of the experience at each stage of the journey will also create opportunities to up- and cross-sell. The trick lies in meeting and engaging with customers where they are, on the various channels they use and prefer.

Provide Access to Customer Service Across Different Channels

This one may seem like an obvious choice, but surprisingly few retailers are getting it right. Nearly three-quarters (71%) of customers say they want to use different support channels depending on the query they have or the help they need. But only 42% of businesses offer two or more customer support channels.

This data highlights the importance of providing access to customer support across channels to remain competitive. And each channel must make the best of customer time and preferences – because time is of the essence when customers decide to interact with retailers and poor issue resolution will send customers elsewhere.

But just providing different channels is not enough. Retailers need to make sure customers can seamlessly switch from one channel to another. And that’s only possible if all channels share the same data, creating a true 360-view of the customer.

The challenge? Many business functions have separate customer data management systems – which means that each function essentially has its own picture of the customer based on the specific information shared with them. Retailers need to eliminate these data and technology silos, and integrate channels in order to share critical insights that can be used to build seamless, high-touch customer experiences at every stage of the journey.

The key to doing this remains centralized and universally accessible data that can be easily harvested and understood.

Unlock the Power of Data and Advanced Analytics

The truth is that raw data on its own doesn’t deliver value. Retailers need to be able to gather insights that they can turn into actionable intelligence – and the ability to harness those capabilities is increasingly driven by advanced analytics.

Embedding analytics in every step of the customer’s lifecycle helps retailers build a holistic view of every customer. Critical data that can help retailers includes:

• Transaction logs

• Demographics/psychographics

• Online clickstream data

• Unstructured data such as social media comments

• Behavior by channel

• Promotional history

Integrating this data and harnessing powerful analytics can help retailers predict customer behavior so they can make recommendations and provide service personalized to individual tastes and preferences.

As a case in point, when we helped a leading North American fashion brand to understand their consumer data and develop customer shopping profiles, average basket size grew by 7%, while the sales conversion rate increased from 15% to 25%. Customer satisfaction levels also rose.

Retailers need end-to-end visibility of the customer value chain by understanding how customers buy, what they buy, when they buy, and where they buy. Using analytics to help them shape this understanding will also equip them with the smart capabilities needed to improve their offering and the service and experience that they provide.

Additional examples of how retailers can apply advanced analytics to improve their personalization strategies and better target customers are:

• Product Affinity: Determine the product(s) a customer will be most interested in based on past purchase behavior.

• Look-alike Modeling: Develop a model of highest value, most loyal customers and then identify customers who behave similarly but haven’t yet achieved the same spend potential. The retailer can then make recommendations and convert untapped customers.

• Churn Defense: Detect customer signals, particularly attrition. If retailers can help customer service agents track and handle customers at risk of attrition from a product, category, or brand, then they can implement strategies to retain them.

• Offer Elasticity: Work out which customers to target with offers and what offers will resonate best.

Key Basket Items for Retailers to Checkout

Transforming customer service into an integrated part of the customer experience improves lifetime value, and business outcomes.

But this transformation depends on turning the data that customers routinely share with brands across multiple touch points – which tends to get siloed in the marketing department or various other functions – over to the customer service team.

Unlocking and distributing this information can enable personalized engagements that reap tangible business benefits: shorter handling and resolution time on complaints, increased Net Promoter Scores and customer satisfaction, as well as higher profits and revenue.

Knowing the customer lies at the heart of what retail customer service agents do. Armed with in-depth knowledge about customers, they can help retailers design, execute, and optimize personalized experiences across channels and the end-to-end experience.

With the right people, processes, products, and platforms in place, retailers can harness rich insights to deliver truly tailored, customer service-driven experiences.