We live in an always-on world, and customers expect retailers to anticipate and meet their needs in real-time. For Retailers, this means that the membrane between customer service and marketing is getting thinner and thinner.
The customer experience is about so much more than just the sales journey, it’s about feeling heard, getting answers to questions, having problems fixed, and feeling a connection to the brand. In addition, to marketing and customer service, retailers need to be thinking in terms of customer engagement.
Why? Because an engaged customer represents 20-22% more revenue than average. Companies that improve customer engagement evidence upsell revenue increase from 15% to 50% and an increase in order size from 5% to 85%. Simply put, engaged customers buy more and spend more.
Customer engagement is about encouraging your customers to interact and share in the experiences you create for them as a business and a brand. When executed well, a strong engagement strategy will foster brand growth and loyalty.
Let’s discuss five key innovative ideas to improve retail customer engagement strategies:
- Focus on omnichannel retailing
Customers expect a personalized consistent experience across all channels like brick-and-visual mortar stores, online catalogs, social media platforms, etc.
Never miss an opportunity to impress or delight your customers by being available over all channels.
Your omnichannel retail strategy should offer customers different ways to request and receive service like calling for support, direct messaging to the social media accounts, chatting with a live agent, interacting with a chatbot, and looking for information in a knowledge base.
- Use inventory management
Managing inventory is the toughest challenge for any product–oriented business. Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that lack internal resources can use a CRM to monitor all inventory in multiple warehouses. Also, can use it to manage purchase orders and customer product orders. With CRM you can know where products are at all times, with real-time tracking.
Actually, CRM technology streamlines the retail business processes on the back end so that you can focus on providing a better overall experience to your customers. For instance, when it comes to billing and accounting, both are contained in a single place and connected to individual customer accounts.
- Drive retail customer experience with innovation
Hyper personalization and the use of modern technologies are the future of retail customer engagement. It enables retailers to give customers exactly what they are looking for. Combining new tools with a personal touch can help you to improve your retail consumer engagement and achieve lasting customer loyalty.
Retail customer experience should not be limited to just in-store experience but can be enhanced across all touchpoints, be it offline or online. It establishes trust, which is becoming increasingly difficult to ensure in an ever-crowded market
- Merge in-store & online purchase behavior
Retailers today are transforming both physical and online offerings by prioritizing the overall customer experience. It is achieved through the addition of digital technology designed to make frictionless connections between the physical and digital shopping channels.
As today’s customers want a seamless transition throughout their shopping journey, from their mobile device and desktop all the way to the store and they want this journey to be easy and convenient.
- Collect customer feedback for continuous improvement
Customer feedback presents you with the opportunity to listen to your customers and assimilate their feedback to grow your business and this is the essential aspects of an excellent customer engagement marketing strategy
In Conclusion, sometimes it can be hard to hear honest negative customer feedback because it can be one of the most important drivers for a change in an organization.
Ultimately whatever customer experience strategies you employ, be consistent, think about the brand messaging you employ, your customers end to end experience from their very first interaction, and the various departments these customers will move through. Give them a consistent and exceptional experience and you’ll be rewarded with their trust and loyalty.
By Carolyne Rabut
Content Marketing – CompuLynx
