Serving Retail Consumers In An Age Of Digital Transformation
By Bryan Gray, Alorica
As the retail industry transitions to a digitally-driven customer experience, companies are faced with the difficult task of creating an exceptional customer journey online. Digitization has drastically changed the way shoppers are engaging with retailers, with increased demand for self-service solutions. This new demand has resulted in more businesses implementing automation technologies such as chatbots and virtual assistants, to help make consumer interactions smarter, faster, easier and more accessible. Specifically, in the retail industry, technology has increased the complexity creating a transformative customer experience. It’s not enough anymore to deliver quality service fast — retailers must be smarter and more strategic.
Celebrating its 20th year in business, Alorica, a global leader in customer experience solutions, calls this shift in consumer inquiries the CX Continuum — the customer service interactions that remain after self-serve automation. These interactions are more complicated, longer in duration and in need of better-equipped customer experience associates. CX is at the heart of our clients’ business and ours — this objective still takes priority regardless of the varied options of distribution channels, from the simplest automated transactions to the most high-touch, problem-solving calls.
This digital transformation has impacted the number of daily transactions and has compounded the intricacy level of consumer needs that cannot be self-served. If most retailer interactions with shoppers were automated, the remaining inquiries would tend to be higher in difficulty; these are interactions that cannot be resolved through simple automation. An example of a basic interaction would be a general billing question or the usual “where’s my stuff?” inquiry. A complex interaction could include troubleshooting a device or returning an item.
As digitization has paved the way for more complicated consumer interactions, there’s more need to hire a new breed of customer experience associates — those with strong critical thinking abilities and a robust general skillset to field these complex inquiries. We call these associates “super agents.” In today’s digital age, retail shoppers often have existing knowledge of products via online research; therefore, their questions are typically more specific and require a more detailed response. The average customer’s product knowledge has altered the way brick-and-mortar and online sales are handled to adapt to the shopper’s needs. This includes changing the dialogue, from asking why a consumer should buy the product or service to explaining how the product or service can solve a problem.
For retailers to successfully implement digitization into their transformative customer experience, fundamental shifts in hiring practices, onboarding and the technologies used to support “super agents” who handle complex inquiries need to take place. Companies also need to implement an employee-first culture that positions employees as brand ambassadors, as these transactions are often the determining factor in whether shoppers believe in the brand or not. How customer experience associates respond during these interactions is how brand loyalty is defined.
Bryan Gray is a Senior Vice President, Client Solutions at Alorica. In this role, Gray identifies new business opportunities with existing clients, many in the retail space, in the pursuit of optimizing profitable revenue and increase market share.