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Customer experience

Customer experience is employee experience – and vice versa

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Contact centres must provide exceptional customer experience (CX) – and technology, such as AI and chatbots, is playing a key role in transforming that experience. The fast-evolving customer journey is, however, also completely changing the employee experience (EX), with agents now tasked primarily with handling the complex and demanding customer interactions that technology cannot resolve.

But how many contact centres are actively assessing the impact on the employee experience  and, critically, measuring the resultant influence on CX? From flexible working to interactions with subject matter experts across the business, call centre agents are working across complex, multi-vendor collaboration environments – and every part of the IT infrastructure needs to work seamlessly if employees are to have the quality of experience required to deliver the new customer journey.

Given the improved business performance associated with engaged employees, the interplay between CX and EX cannot be overlooked. Tony Smith (pictured, above), contact centre and employee experience expert, IR explores the correlation between employee engagement, job satisfaction and customer satisfaction, and the importance of a single view of the truth across the entire customer – and employee – journey.

Engage Everyone

It is increasingly recognised that the delivery of great customer experience (CX) demands a great employee experience (EX), but far too few companies consider the two in tandem. Just as it is highly unlikely that dis-engaged employees would go the extra mile to help customers, contact centre employees faced with unhappy customer after unhappy customer are hardly having a great EX – and that can lead to higher rates of churn, disruption and, as a result, a poor CX.  It cuts both ways.

The challenge is that today’s contact centre environment is hugely complex. Companies have invested heavily in an array of innovative technologies designed to allow customers to interact through a variety of mediums. They are leveraging AI and chatbots to empower customers with 24×7 self-service. And they are encouraging agents to reach out  directly to subject matter experts in a bid to accelerate the resolution of complex customer questions. The problem for both customers and employees is that the experience across this complex environment is rarely seamless.

How many call abandonments are due to employees’ poor video quality when working from home? Are employee churn rates rising because customers are fed up with constantly repeating information from chat bot to web screen and agent? Companies will never achieve the customer journey vision without truly understanding, tracking and managing the interaction between CX and EX.

Complex Environments

The CX journey is often envisaged at corporate level but translating that to reality is not straightforward, especially when departments are using different technology.  It makes perfect sense for customers to self-serve but what happens when an individual needs to transition to an agent? Is the information input by the customer during a webchat automatically captured and shared with the contact centre agent when the interaction moves to a video call? If not, and the customer has to repeat the information every single time, the agent is starting each interaction in a negative situation, causing frustration on both sides, and leading to a quality of EX that is likely to accelerate agent churn.

Plus, of course, employees are often working remotely, which means the CX reaches through the organisation and into people’s homes. How is the business managing the new challenges associated with ISPs, Wi-Fi, laptops, unauthorised cameras and headsets, as well as multiple video conferencing platforms and collaboration tools? If contact centre employees do not have a good digital workplace, and if their tools are not performing as they should, their EX is too poor to enable the delivery of the desired CX.

It is important for the CX and EX teams to come together, to understand the customer journey, where it interacts with employee journey and to determine how, where and when problems are occurring. And that requires an end-to-end view of the entire IT estate: it is simply not possible to achieve the depth of understanding or speed of response required when reliant on disparate data provided by different monitoring tools.

Single Journey View

End-to-end monitoring of the entire contact centre environment, including home working and the different UC tools used across the organisation, can provide the business with invaluable insight into both CX and EX, and how they overlap. With a single view across the organisation, from contact centre tools to voice applications, video platforms, web and collaboration tools, a business can quickly determine whether the current IT estate can support the customer journey vision.

In addition to identifying strategic issues, such as the need to increase capacity at peak hours, a single view can also rapidly flag problems at a granular level to minimise disruption and avoid dissatisfaction. If agents – and customers – are complaining about video quality, for example, is the problem the video platform, the operating system, public internet, router or Wi-Fi? Or has the agent plugged in their own headphones and speakers? Is there a problem in achieving successful interactions between contact centre agents using one UC and subject matter experts using another? A single, cross platform tool can rapidly flag an issue, identify the problem and enable rapid remediation.

A single view of the truth also provides companies with a chance to assess the potential impact of changes that may affect the customer journey. Will, for example, a deployment of a new ERP or CRM system affect any part of the customer journey due to network capacity issues? How will the introduction of a new customer self-service tool work in practice? Using synthetic testing to assess the end-to-end implications for both CX and EX is enormously valuable, ensuring a business never introduces a change without truly understanding the wider business implications.

Conclusion

Investment in technology has become a priority for companies not only to improve CX but also address the challenge of employee recruitment and retention by delivering a better EX. In the process, however, too many have inadvertently created new pressures that need, urgently, to be addressed if the business is to deliver its optimal customer journey.

Bringing together those tasked with CX and EX and providing trusted, cross business insight can be transformational. With a complete understanding of both journeys, where they overlap and are complementary, a company can ensure that every change, and every technology investment is understood and managed to ensure the customer journey vision is realised to the satisfaction of both customers and employees.

www.ir.com/products/collaborate

Balancing economics with environmental concerns in the world of customer service

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Can businesses react to the current economic landscape and ‘do more with less’, while still minimising environmental impact, accelerating growth and delivering excellent customer service? We asked Tony Lorentzen (pictured), Nuance’s SVP of Intelligent Engagement…

How are modern technologies transforming the customer experience, especially within call centres?

Despite many consumers today preferring to communicate with brands online, we cannot disregard the importance of the ‘human touch’ when it comes to customer experience. As individuals, when we have a problem or even just a question, we all want to feel as if there is somebody listening to and helping us. During face-to-face interactions in the past, this was a given. However, when the interaction becomes digital it can be very easy to feel as if you are on your own. Often, those calling with an enquiry are either concerned or frustrated. The last thing they need is another barrier getting in the way of them accessing the right support quickly.

This is where modern technologies, such as biometric solutions, can help. For example, voice biometrics can use sophisticated algorithms to analyse many voice characteristics – from pronunciation and accent to size and shape of the nasal passage – to authenticate a user. Meanwhile, conversational biometrics can measure how a person uses language during messaging interactions such as live chat or email, analysing vocabulary, spelling, grammar, sentence structure, and other factors to build a model representing each person’s unique pattern of communication.

Both technologies can be used to validate whether someone is who they say they are immediately based on how they sound. This means that any interaction with a brand can be personalised from the offset, enabling individuals to feel as though they are a priority.

And how do these technologies help companies to protect their customers?

Whilst there will never be one single silver bullet for fighting fraud, using biometric technologies is a step in the right direction. This is because, by using them, customers don’t need to remember something specific and worry about that information being stolen. There is no longer even a need to be authenticated using specific passphrase such as ‘my voice is my password’. Instead, biometric technologies enable organisations to validate a person’s identity from the outset.

One company that has already witnessed some of the benefits of biometric technology – and is using it to protect its customers during this time of uncertainty – is HSBC.

In recent years banking interactions have seen a definite shift away from in-person visits. More people are now turning to digital channels and telephone banking. While this modern way of banking is more convenient for customers, it does introduce some additional risks as fraudsters may find it easier to attempt to impersonate customers by stealing or guessing personal information to pass security checks.

It’s much more difficult, however, to replicate someone’s voice, which is where HSBC UK’s voice biometrics come into play. The bank’s Voice ID system detects whether a person is legitimate by comparing their voice to the voiceprint stored for the known customer. HSBC also goes one step further by maintaining a library of fraudsters’ voiceprints to cross check incoming calls. Since the technology was introduced in the UK, over 43,000 fraudulent phone calls have been identified, with over £981 million of customers’ money protected. 

How do you think that businesses can react to the current economic landscape and ‘do more with less’ while still accelerating growth?

As customer-facing businesses start to feel the pinch, the focus will be on streamlining operations whilst still ensuring the highest levels of customer experience. Automation is likely to emerge as a primary strategy for getting this balance right. By automating customer interactions, organisations will be able to scale their services and guide customers toward lower-cost channels.

Take Swedbank as an example. At this retail bank, a virtual assistant now handles more than two million conversations a year and answers around 80% of customer questions. That’s a huge reduction in the number of routine inquiries agents have to handle, leaving them free to focus on higher value, profit making tasks.

For many call centres, automating manual workflows – such as post-call summarisation – is becoming a key part of doing business. This is because it helps to boost agent productivity and enable them to handle an increased number of customers in less time. Equally important is process automation, as organisations continue to use AI to automate backend processes, uncovering new efficiencies.

Moving forward, many contact centres will take it one step further – providing real-time AI coaching, including next best response recommendations and best practice guidance, so that new hires can perform from the outset. Meanwhile, AI-powered sentiment analysis will enable agents to offer more empathetic and efficient interactions, guiding the conversation through the fastest path to resolution.

Ultimately, widespread automation will help organisations identify and eliminate wasteful processes and duplicated effort, and optimise workflows to support greater efficiency – something which becomes even more important during challenging economic times.

Chat GPT has been grabbing media attention in recent months. How do you think this technology – and others like it will power the future of CX?

 The global public attention that greeted the launch of ChatGPT has highlighted that we’re at a pivotal moment in the development of AI. As contact volumes rise and contact centre costs face increasing scrutiny, customer engagement leaders are under pressure to do more with less, without compromising the customer experience. ChatGPT is a technology that, when implemented correctly, might be able to help with this.

This is why, Microsoft and Nuance have recently unveiled our brand new conversation boosters –  exciting GPT-powered capabilities for our contact centre AI solutions. By harnessing the power of Azure OpenAI, these have been designed to help customers to make the most of the latest advances in AI technology and create even more effective conversational experiences in Nuance Mix, our conversational AI tooling platform.

As part of this development, one of the capabilities we’ve introduced is Nuance Mix Builder – a Copilot feature in Nuance Mix – which will make it faster and easier than ever to create intelligent chatbots and voicebots that boost automation and customer satisfaction.

By utilising GPT-3 capabilities, this development will enable teams to build enterprise-grade bots and deliver conversational experiences to customers, without requiring any deep technical skills. All users will need to do is describe in their own words what they want the bot to do and Mix Builder will immediately create something relevant and meaningful. It means that this type of bot creation is no longer limited to those with a technical background. Anyone from citizen developers to speech scientists will share the same toolset, making collaboration simpler and enabling businesses to give their customer experience strategies a powerful boost.

Demand for a blended omnichannel customer experience grows

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While almost half of consumers (47%) preferring to visit the high street to shop for clothing in person, new research indicates consumer readiness to shop in-store now comes with a new set of expectations when it comes to ongoing engagement.

That’s according to NTT DATA, which says that over the past couple of years, consumers have been pushed to shop online more than ever, becoming accustomed to the enhanced personalisation capabilities and tightly tailored experience offered by online shopping.

The problem, though, was the lack of realness – the lack of a sensory, traditional shopping experience that accompanies in-store retailing. Now, with consumers eager to return to shopping in stores, retailers need to be ready to accommodate them by delivering enhanced customer experiences.

NTT DATA UK&I’s research, which questioned a representative sample of 2,000 consumers in the UK, set out to discover what consumers are looking for when it comes to their retail experience in 2023.

The findings show that 53% of consumers expect a clean and easy shopping experience in-store, facilitated by more immersive, personalised, and contactless services. The first port of call to improve the customerexperience starts with streamlining the payments process, as almost two-thirds of respondents (61%) claimed self-service and cashier-less checkouts would encourage them to shop in-store more often.

The findings also uncovered that consumers now want to bring the online shopping experience into the store as well, having the option to view all information on a product, while still being able to have the traditional shopping experience. 1 in 5 respondents said the introduction of QR codes on products to view additional information that they would normally see online, such as prices, reviews, and the provenance of items, would greatly improve the in-store shopping experience.

Other technologies that have grabbed consumers’ attention for the in-store shopping experience also include smart mirrors (16%), interactive display screens in-store (13%), and app integrations (13%), where customers can select items on an app which are automatically sent to the fitting room or checkout while they continue to browse the store.

For retailers, this means implementing new technology and resources that will help them gain insights into their shoppers’ habits and preferences, allowing them to determine the ways they need to restrategise and retain their customers’ loyalty. This need will be especially important for luxury brands. With traditionally larger budgets to spend on new resources and technology, they have an opportunity to enhance the shopping experience by taking advantage of all available capabilities.

Key findings:

Technology can encourage consumers in-store for purchasing clothing:

  • 47% of consumers prefer to purchase clothing in-store on the high street.
  • 53% of consumers want a clean and easy shopping experience in-store.
  • 61% say that the option to use a cashier-less or self-service checkout would encourage them to shop in-store when purchasing clothing.
  • 20% of consumers want to see QR codes in-store which share more information on the products they are buying.
  • 16% say that smart mirrors would encourage them to shop in-store when purchasing clothing.
  • 13% would be encouraged in-store by interactive display screens.
  • 13% would be encouraged in-store by app integrations which allow them to select items via the app to be sent to a fitting room or checkout while continuing to browse.

Geoff Lloyd, Director of Retail at NTT DATA UK&I, said: “Consumers want to see more from retailers, especially after the online retail experience has evolved to become more personalised. By implementing the right, advanced digital systems to automate processes and offer additional insights, retailers can monitor their customers’ behaviours more effectively, and match the customer experience to their needs appropriately.

“Access to predictive analytics will prove especially beneficial to retailers as they start building resilience, meeting customer demands and maximising sales. Additionally, reassessing their 2023 plans and ensuring that effective strategies are in place, both online and in-store, will ensure they are offering a consistent, tech-savvy experience to their shoppers.

“Data insights are, and will continue to be, essential for retailers. Not only will these insights help brands assess what their customers want from them, but it will also help to personalise the shopping experience, building loyalty and protecting future profitability.”

Business Decision Makers: Their CX concerns, and how to resolve them

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By Dan Burkland, President at Five9

As the cost-of-living crisis forces customers to tighten their belts, effective and receptive customer service remains the key to maintaining success. Focusing on customer experience (CX), even through periods of economic instability, can increase a company’s profitability by up to 2% and shareholder return by up to 10%.

Business leaders are now faced with difficult decisions, and CX teams must ensure they are looking at three key goals: reducing expenditure, increasing empathy with customers, and prioritising adaptability in an ever-changing environment.

Businesses are facing waves of resignations as talent teams struggle to source and retain employees. It’s not just the well-being of customers that CX teams need to consider – it is their employees too. When employees are motivated and knowledgeable, they are able to give better customer service, resulting in improved customer experience – but that only comes from improving the employee experience (EX).

Investing in new areas might initially seem counterintuitive during economic turbulence. But compromising on CX directly impacts brand loyalty – nearly a third (32%) of customers stated they would stop doing business with a brand after just one poor experience.

A recent study of business decision-makers identified key strategies in helping businesses to transform the experience of their call centre agents, and consequently, customer experiences.

Unlocking the informed and empathetic agent

The CX study found that while 86% of contact centre decision makers report an increase in the volume of interactions, 72% also note an increase in agent turnover. Contact centres are clearly a casualty of the Great Attrition, with employees reevaluating their approach and demanding greater flexibility, more remote working options, and a stronger focus on well-being. In fact, more than half (54%) of contact centre employees are not willing to go back to the office full time.

Therefore, organisations must look to cloud-based technologies to offer a seamless agent experience from home to office. With all customer data and comms in the cloud, agents can securely access the information they need, wherever they choose to work.

However, it is not just a question of making your organisation more attractive to retain and hire agents, but also ensuring that you have the technology in place to cope with this deluge of interactions at speed. Currently, less than half (47%) of contact centres are starting to adopt AI to provide agent assistance, which is essential for giving employees the information they need to drive quality interactions at scale.

Bringing together human empathy and judgment, with the speed and scale of AI offers the best of both worlds for customer service. More than half (53%) of decision-makers reported that agents need emotional intelligence and empathy, with customer issues becoming increasingly complex, so collaborative intelligence technologies should be a key area for both CX and EX investment.

Making every interaction meaningful

Empathy has replaced expediency as customers seek a more human customer experience. Customers want and expect agents to truly listen to their needs, understand and identify with their situation and feelings, solve their issues, and answer their questions effectively. Above all, they want to connect on whatever channel is most convenient for them at that moment. Therefore, businesses must ensure that however customers choose to get in contact, they can resolve these queries simply, quickly and on a variety of channels.

Encouragingly, the majority (95%) of contact centre decision-makers say their organisation provides an omnichannel experience. In fact, 40% of customer interactions now take place via non-voice digital channels, with 69% expecting more than 40% of customer support interactions to be fully self-handled by 2024. Organisations are clearly stepping up with expanded digital and self-service options, to provide options that ‘meet their customers where they are’ and reduce costs.

Yet nearly a third (30%) stated that these channels are not integrated. Organisations must therefore work to bring customer and contextual data together to ensure a seamless experience across every channel. Fortunately, by integrating all data within the cloud, organisations will create a 360-degree view of each customer to enable seamless experiences across any channel or touchpoint. Whether customers opt for ever-growing self-service options or want to chat to an agent over the phone, ensuring that the right data is in the right place to inform interactions is essential.

Looking towards the future, it’s paramount that businesses act decisively to address CX challenges. Self-service, multi-channel and AI offerings are quickly becoming commonplace for customers – organisations must provide their agents with the right software to work as efficiently and reactively as possible. By bringing the focus to both employee experience and customer experience, customer loyalty and satisfaction can be maintained, increasing profit in periods when it is needed the most.

The Store Re-Imagined: 3 tips for delivering tomorrow’s retail experience today

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By Alex MacPherson, Director of Solution Consultancy and Account Management, Manhattan Associates

There are few in retail circles who would argue that the role of the Store is the same as it ever was. With the rate of change accelerating like never before, consumers are throwing new challenges at retailers faster than they can implement solutions.

It’s no wonder that many retailers seem to be in a perpetual state of paralysis: first it was Covid-19 generating a ten year acceleration of digital commerce adoption; now a deceleration towards pre-Covid digital growth rates, combined with late 2021 inventory swing (collected to initially avoid supply chain shortages) has caused a surplus of merchandise so great, that it is contributing to many western economies teetering on the brink of recession.

The idea of the store as a laggard is nothing new. We let it be that way because it worked. However, the last few years have brought into focus the impact that the static store can have on retail businesses and there is undoubtedly an opportunity to adapt the store to the changed landscape it now occupies.

To do so effectively, retailers will need to adopt agile, flexible and often unfamiliar ways of working to ensure ongoing alignment with the expectations of a continually changing customer base. With increased consumer expectations for convenience, transparency and personalization, the opportunity to augment the store, if done correctly, has the potential to yield significant operating efficiencies and cultivate meaningful brand loyalty too.

Beyond 2022, a store equipped to support digitally initiated commerce workflows (from fulfilment to customer service and everything in between) will become the minimum viable product. Retailers that meet this and excel in areas beyond the baseline are those that will outperform their peers.

If you’re still reading I am likely preaching to the choir and you’re asking ‘so what are we to do about it?’ It’s a good news – bad news situation.

Bad news, there is no silver bullet or big technology project that can solve all of the challenges, it’ll take some smart humans too. The good news, however, having spent time with hundreds of global brands and retailers, we’ve distilled this thinking into a single place.

Below are three tips for retailers looking to reimagine and reinvent the role of one of their most valuable brand assets – the store.

UNDERSTAND WHAT THE CUSTOMER WANTS 

In a world where discovery happens online and everything is available at our fingertips, it’s important to understand why your customers still go to the store.

The best retailers are gathering consumer insights (real data)  to identify what role the store plays in the consumer journey and optimise accordingly. For some, the convenience and immediacy of the store is critical. For others,  it’s a high touch and personalised buying experience. For most, it’s a unique blend that calls for a blended solution.

Well trained store teams, fast and flexible technology and data informed decision making are almost always part of getting it right. If you asked your entire team why customers visit stores, would everyone give the same answer? And, more importantly, would it be the same answer your customers provide?

Getting closer to your customer and understanding the way they think is step one.

MEASURE THE RIGHT THINGS, AND THEN SOME 

While KPIs like conversion, sell through and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) undoubtedly matter, they aren’t the end-all, be-all for top performing retailers. Once you’ve figured out why customers go to the store, the next step is to figure out how to measure and improve your performance against their expectations.

Once retailers understand why their customers are visiting their stores, it’s important to be able to take a step back, look at the big picture and ask yourself: ‘do we really have the technology in place to continue to monitor our performance against these expectations?’

For every measure of fiscal performance or operating efficiency there needs to be a measurement for customer store satisfaction. Maybe it’s as simple as a Net Promoter Score, or maybe it’s something more advanced and revealing.

For example, if you were to compare online sales to retail sales within defined proximity ranges to the store (i.e.  five miles vs ten miles vs 25 miles), you could find out just how far customers are willing to travel for the store experience. And, within that customer segment, what are the variances between the digital customer, the store customer and the customer who shops both – now wouldn’t that be interesting to know?

If you’re looking for advanced metrics to better understand how the store impacts your customer base, that’s step two.

INVEST IN THE RIGHT TOOLS FOR THE RIGHT EXPERIENCE 

So how exactly should retailers be thinking about their stores in today’s changeable retail environment? It’s a big question, with many possible start points, but for us, we’d always start with data.

For modern-thinking, future-looking brands, the importance of being able to aggregate data (be that real-time inventory, transactional or even customer data passing it back and forth from digital channels like social media) is the key to success.

Take Point-of-Sale (POS) technologies as an example over the last few years. POS has come a long way since the rather perfunctory function of previous generations. No longer is POS simply a tool to complete a transaction (sales or returns) and the associated reporting, modern POS today represents the key to seamless, unified commerce, enabling activities such as endless aisle, click & collect, store fulfilment of online orders, clienteling and loyalty.

For example, ask yourself this: do your store associates have the training, tools and processes in place to meet new, more exacting customer expectations? Are there reliable, flexible, modern commerce tools in place to transact how customers want? Or, are your systems user-friendly and accurate enough to make navigating product availability easy for an associate to search and educate a customer on the spot?

Today’s retailers require technology with the infrastructure, agility, flexibility and scalability to join all the digital dots together if they are to maximise the potential of their stores and deliver a truly seamless, memorable customer experience.

Recognizing this and looking towards solutions that unify all aspects of the fulfilment process and customer journey is the third step to consider.

The changes the retail industry has witnessed more recently (accelerated by the pandemic) are no different to periods of change seen in the past – they are simply the latest in a long line of retail transformations and disruptions.

While the store of yesteryear may have been resigned to the annals of retail history, today’s stores are enjoying somewhat of a renaissance, in large part due to the new technology available.

With retailers today needing to rethink traditionally held ideas around assets and operations, it is no longer simply a matter of digital Vs. physical. Critically, it’s about how a brand can leverage all its merchandise, all of its customer data and all of the channels at its disposal to deliver that truly remarkable, seamless customerexperience.

Although the function of the store and the technology needed to operate it are fundamentally changed, today’s stores still have a key role to play in the retail narrative, and are still very much at the forefront of this latest retail revival.

Peak season delivery is more complex than ever: Here’s how to address the critical CX challenges and more

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By Andrew Tavener, Head of Fleet Marketing EMEA, Descartes 

With the holiday shopping season fast approaching, retailers are bracing for the logistical and customer service challenges that accompany peak season volumes. This year, though retailers face added complexity as they continue to struggle with inventory issues, staff shortages, and ongoing supply chain disruptions – not to mention rising fuel prices. At the same time, customer expectations for fast, convenient, on-time delivery and real-time delivery communication continue to grow. Throw into the mix an increasing focus amongst consumers on home delivery sustainability, and you have a maelstrom of factors that retailers have to contend with.

Delivery Performance Faltering

In the face of peak season order volumes, last-mile delivery has become a trigger point for defining the customer experience. Unfortunately, as consumers head into the holiday shopping season, many are frustrated and taking action against poor performers.

A recent study of 8,000 European and North American consumers found that nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of consumers experienced delivery problems in the October–December 2021 holiday shopping period. The top three issues (see Figure 1) were related to timeliness: deliveries were late (26 percent); deliveries didn’t arrive when promised (22 percent); and time windows for deliveries were too long and inconvenient (22 percent). Plus, a disgruntled 16 percent didn’t receive their delivery.

This poor delivery performance can be catastrophic for retailers during peak season, especially with many online vendors relying on high sales volumes during the holidays to buoy revenues. Nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of the study respondents refused to order from poorly performing retailers again; nearly a quarter lost trust in both the delivery company (24 percent) and the retailer (21 percent). Additionally, 17 percent of consumers indicated they advised friends and family to avoid the retailer. E-commerce vendors that accept mediocre delivery quality will likely experience hits to their holiday sales tallies as consumers turn to competitors that do find ways to meet consumers’ expectations.

Keeping Pace with Peak Season Demands

Meeting the delivery performance expectations of holiday shoppers begins well before the product is loaded onto the truck — with visibility into the warehouse. From an inventory management (and customer trust) perspective, retailers must ensure the products presented online accurately reflect available inventory. Furthermore, consumers should be able to choose from various delivery options at the point of sale (POS).

On the home delivery front, while delivery speed remains – for many consumers – a factor in purchase decisions, notably, consumers place more value on retailers keeping their delivery promise. To meet delivery expectations and keep customers happy (preventing failed deliveries and returning for post-holiday purchases), e-commerce retailers must find ways to boost last-mile efficiency, productivity and reliability.

Increased Value on Sustainable Home Delivery

If all these factors weren’t challenging enough, further research around home delivery sustainability has revealed its increasing importance to a significant percentage of consumers. Indeed, only 38 percent of over 8000 consumers across nine countries in Europe and North America thought that most retailers were doing a good job of sustainable home delivery.

Furthermore, 60 percent of consumers today have environmental importance expectations for their home deliveries – from combining orders, accepting longer lead times for delivery, to having the retailer recommend the most friendly delivery option. And, if we look five years ahead, there is also a growing trend from consumers that the use of eco-friendly vehicles and a retailer’s ability to show home delivery carbon footprint will play a factor in their purchasing choices.

If a proportion of consumers are willing to compromise on convenience to ensure greater retailer sustainability, then the imperative to get efficiency and reliability right holds even greater emphasis, with a focus on making every mile as green as possible. 

Sustainable Home Delivery as Competitive Differentiator

While critical to an optimised customer experience, final mile delivery is a complex part of the fulfilment process – and is only becoming increasingly more so.

By implementing technology that creates efficiencies across the delivery lifecycle — from dynamic delivery appointment scheduling, delivery route planning, and continuous route optimisation to GPS-enabled real-time mobile tracking, mobile proof-of-delivery, and delivery status notifications — retailers can give consumers more delivery choices, improve delivery reliability, keep customers informed of delivery status, and – crucially – provide different consumers with parameters for home delivery that suit their specific priorities.

Indeed, gearing up with the right technology tools can help e-commerce retailers keep their delivery promise, whatever that may be — a critical factor in building customer loyalty and driving repeat business — by ensuring customers get the products they want, delivered to their door, at the expected time.

Moreover, these tools can also lay the foundation for agile and dynamic home delivery options that meet consumers’ growing needs for both convenience and sustainability.

The importance of CX in the retail industry

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There’s no denying that the past year has had a huge impact on the retail industry, from supply chains to customer service. With stores closing their doors and e-commerce booming, retailers had to adapt their processes rapidly to meet new customer behaviours and needs.

Retail technology saw a boom, click & collect became more popular than ever, and customer service operations moved to more diverse channels as digital-savvy consumers looked for more ways to resolve their queries.

Despite all these changes 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services (Source: Salesforce). Consumers expect short wait times, quick solutions, and personalised interactions at every touchpoint.

The demand for omnichannel retail solutions and customer care has never been higher due to consumers’ increasing reliance on technology and the rise of new and distinct types of problems as the retail sector changed as a result of the pandemic. Retail contact centres have been introducing more channels than ever before to connect with customers to inform them about changes to services, orders, and reopenings, from chatbots and videochat to Twitter and Instagram.

Customers now expect their favourite retail brands to have multiple options of communication. Many consumers shopping for retail products start their journey online, and usually with a search. Many paths to purchase in retail also involve a consumer calling a store location or contact center.

To gain a unified consumer view, businesses must connect all of their channels. The opportunity cost of not being omnichannel is 10% in lost revenue (Source: VendHQ). A failure to provide high-quality omnichannel experiences directly impacts ROI and 38% of consumers will stop doing business with a company if they have a bad call experience (source: Invoca). Providing great call experiences is what Woven do best.

Visit https://wearewoven.com/retail-industry to see how we are helping the retail industry.

Digital customer engagement solutions: 2022/23 buying trends revealed

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Live Chat, AI Applications and Self-Service top the list of solutions the UK’s leading customer engagement professionals are sourcing in 2022/23.

The findings have been revealed ahead of this week’s Digital Customer Engagement Summit, which takes place on October 20th.

Delegates registering to attend the event have been asked which areas they needed to invest in during 2022 and beyond.

A significant 47% are looking to invest in Live Chat, with 38% sourcing AI Applications and the same percentage on the hint for Self-Service solutions.

Just behind were Social Media Monitoring, Case Management and Multichannel Survey Tools.

Top products & solutions being sourced by delegates at the Digital Customer Engagement Summit (Top 10):

Online Live Chat Systems
AI Applications
Self-Service
Social Media Monitoring
Case Management
Multichannel Survey Tools
Unified Communications
Business Intelligence
Predictive Routing
Text Analysis

To find out more about the Digital Customer Engagement Summit, visit https://digitalcustomerengagement.co.uk.

The Cloud – Debunking the myth

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
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Cloud technology is not just for big business. While the costs, including implementation, may have pushed cloud solutions out of the investment scope of many small to medium sized companies in the past, that is no longer the case. Cloud technologies are now ubiquitous and affordable.

The flexibility and cost model provides businesses of any size with a chance to compete on a level playing field against even the biggest competition. Plus, by removing reliance on often ageing in house systems, companies can both achieve essential resilience and take advantage of the latest in innovative technology, including real-time data analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).

Yet these mid-sized businesses are also head down, wrestling with constantly evolving operational challenges, from skills shortages to supply chain delays and raging inflation. Management teams lack the time and often confidence to explore technology innovation and, as a result, too many companies are missing vital opportunities to cut costs, boost efficiency and reach new customers.

The cloud is now an essential foundation of successful business operations and, as Guy Parry- Williams, Managing Director, Imedia8 explains, it’s time to talk to a trusted partner that can demystify the cloud and create a one stop shop business focused solution that delivers immediate operational benefits.

Digital Ubiquity

Every business is, to a greater or lesser degree, digital in 2022. Even the smallest companies have moved to online accounting packages such as Sage or Xero. Companies have web mail services and Office 365 or Google Docs. Many rely on online marketplace platforms to buy stock or make sales. These solutions are all in the cloud – and yet far too many mid-sized organisations still feel excluded from access to the cloud technologies that have transformed operations for the vast majority of their larger – and often smaller – competitors.

In many ways, these organisations – the medium sized SMEs – have been overlooked by cloud services providers. Ten years ago, the largest businesses were wooed by Amazon, Microsoft and Google; they were helped to create a cloud strategy and embarked upon a transition away from on premise systems. The big providers then moved to the next tier of companies, those employing hundreds or thousands of staff. More recently, the smallest businesses that were previously running nothing more complicated than a few PCs have found it easy to sign up to subscription services.

But this still leaves a significant proportion of mid-sized companies that have been totally ignored by the market. Companies that are still wrestling with aged on-premise systems; that have never explored powerful machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) tools or gained access to real time data analytics. Companies that risk being left far behind the competition.

Trusted Advice

For companies without an IT Director, all the talk about digital transformation and embracing the cloud can appear either daunting or completely irrelevant to the business. What is the cloud? Where is the business’ data located? What is the difference between Software as a Service (SaaS) and subscription software? Does it have any relevance to a company managing food distribution or an NGO providing healthcare to individuals across the world?

Despite the confusing language, this is a far simpler approach to buying and running essential technology systems and services. The cloud is just a giant data centre – a massive location full of racks and racks of servers. There is no essential difference to the on-premise computer room that companies have had for years – it’s just bigger. The real benefit is that the time and resources required to ensure the IT infrastructure is up and running is handled by someone else on the business’ behalf, to specific levels of high availability performance.

And that, as every business discovered during the pandemic, is an increasingly important benefit. However immature a company’s digital evolution, every business relies on technology. From tracking deliveries to allowing customers to place orders, system failure adds cost and stress. Business interruption is recognised as a serious operational risk – which is one of the reasons that mid-tier organisations are now realising they have missed out on the cloud benefits for too long.

Open Discussion

While the cloud is now affordable and accessible, this is a significant strategic change. Companies should never make an investment in new technology without first considering their strategic direction. Cloud transformations can be complex and, unless well executed properly, can lead to serious operational inefficiencies and data leakage. It is vital to consider how and where the cloud can support business needs – rather than focusing just on technology change.

A trusted provider that can host, manage and support the entire infrastructure – while also acting as an outsourced IT Director, and developing custom software – can ensure the transition is both smooth and targeted.  Furthermore, it can ensure that while the priority is to rapidly migrate to the cloud to gain efficiencies and cost benefits, the business does not overlook opportunities for innovation.

For many business owners, taking the step to have an open, honest conversation that focuses on operational goals rather that the details of cloud technology can be an eye opener. Like the logistics company based at Heathrow which was astonished to discover that live flight data could be integrated into its systems. Using this information within automated systems – such as updating delivery information to customers – and providing new levels of data insight and analysis saved the business £100,000s every year, providing ROI within months.

Conclusion

Every business will have a different priority – from fears of power blackouts that could take the entire operation offline to the need to respond to an agile competitor muscling in on a key customer base or attracting top talent by offering flexible working. The adoption of cloud technologies, from accounting to customer relational management, can deliver immediate benefits that reflect key business goals, from revenue growth to improved resilience, reduced costs to improved mobility.

Yet too many mid-sized businesses are still missing out due to a lack of cloud knowledge and support – and a cloud market that takes a tech-first approach that can be both confusing and irrelevant. It is the business led focus that is key. Investing in technology, including the cloud, is just one more business decision. Get it right, and it will repay the investment quickly. It should not be daunting: working with a supplier that can quickly demystify the cloud can both transform the cost base and unlock unimagined opportunities.

The benefits of live chat on your website

 960 640 Guest Post
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Live chat used to be a “nice to have” service offering, Today, more than 41% of customers expect live chat on your website and more than half of all customers prefer to chat with someone in real-time and online. It gives customers a way to reach you at the exact moment that they have questions or problems they can’t solve.

Customer experience plays a key role in your business’ growth and revenue. Being available in the channel that best suites them is a factor of delivering exceptional customer experiences.

At Woven we can provide your business with seamless live chat technology for your team or even manage it for you.

Benefits:

  • Improved support experience
  • Increased customer engagement and satisfaction
  • Connected customer experience
  • Increases first contact resolution
  • Reduced service costs and boost efficiency

With tPoint Live Chat and Messenger the possibilities are endless:

  • Quick replies and predetermined responses to common questions
  • Live Chat Screen transfer for secure payments – not visible to advisors
  • tPoint powered End Feedback Survey to aid improvement to your customers experience
  • Consistent Advisor Experience with unified Agent Desktop so your advisors can respond to interactions on Chat or Social DM

If you would like to know more, let’s talk?

Contact us on hello@wearewoven.com or give us a call on 0333 103 7337 to find out more about our live chat services.

www.wearewoven.com