Contact Centre Summit | Forum Events Contact Centre Summit | Forum Events Contact Centre Summit | Forum Events Contact Centre Summit | Forum Events Contact Centre Summit | Forum Events

Posts Tagged :

CX

2024 Contact Centre Predictions: The intersection of brand, CX, and AI?

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
By:
0

As 2023 came to a close, a survey by Which? found that on average 20% of customers were unhappy with their most recent customer service interaction. Many leading consumer brands were found to be falling behind on basic service KPIs, with almost a quarter unhappy with how long it took to speak to someone who could help (23%) and how long it took to get an answer to their query (22%).

CX tech provider Avaya says the focus for 2024 will be on the impact contact centres have on CX and brand image – with AI innovation redefining CX and brand alignment. Here are their three trends to watch out for:

1.       AI to Enable the Experience Economy – Alan Masarek, CEO, Avaya
“With companies firmly in the ‘Experience Economy,’ where goods and services have been commoditised, and the customer experiences companies create will matter most, the focus in 2024 will be on innovating the customer experience to drive differentiation and growth. Brands are increasingly recognising that their contact centres are at the ‘tip of the spear’ for driving differentiating experiences for their customers, and AI-powered innovations will be front and centre to supercharge CX solutions.

If 2023 was about the ‘potential of AI,’ the dynamic will shift in 2024 to demonstrating how AI investments must translate directly and tangibly to driving tangible business value by contributing to top and bottom-line improvements and competitive advantage. And, because CEOs and Boards of Directors are increasingly focused on managing risk, privacy, security, and business ethics concerns associated with AI technology, 2024 will increasingly be a year where these issues come to the forefront.”

2.       CMO to Have an Increased Role in CX – Josh Mueller, CMO, Avaya
“In 2024, businesses will see the role of the CMO become more heavily entwined in the efforts to build stronger customer experience and interactions. In the contact centre, specifically, expect to see CMOs closer to the content delivered in the contact centre through campaign messaging, contact centre agent training, or hands-on roles in applying AI to call routing. In the coming year, CMOs will play an increasingly crucial role in the experiential side of customer interactions.”

3.       AI in the Contact Center – Omar Javaid, CPO, Avaya
“Over the next year, there will be two areas of focus for AI-powered innovation in the contact centre. The first will be using AI to delegate menial tasks away from contact centre agents, boosting overall productivity while allowing agents to focus on creating higher-quality customer experiences and driving greater agent job satisfaction and retention. The second will be on how AI and/or ML investments can help customers navigate to their desired resolution much quicker than any previous solutions have allowed, driving customer engagement, satisfaction, and, potentially, share of wallet revenue gains.”

Photo by BoliviaInteligente on Unsplash

Ireland’s Permanent TSB tackles employee and customer experience

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
By:
0

Irish bank Permanent TSB has selected Medallia to deliver its Voice of the Customer (VoC) and employee experience programmes, representing a continuation of their four-year partnership.

Medallia’s enterprise experience platform will support the retail bank in further embedding customer and employee engagement initiatives to promote organisational change through the power of positive experiences.

Permanent TSB (PTSB) has been supporting communities in the Republic of Ireland for over 200 years, with 3,000 employees serving more than 1.2 million customers. The bank says it’s constantly striving to improve its customers’ financial wellbeing, attract and retain talent, and enhance the bank’s trustworthiness with all stakeholders. Central to this is actively evolving company culture, improving its customer and employee experience in tandem.

PTSB initially selected Medallia to reimagine its customer experience strategy in 2019, recognising the need for a more robust strategy to fully understand customer pain points. A year later PTSB chose Medallia to deliver its new employee experience programme, ‘Every Voice Counts.’

At a time of turbulence in the Irish financial market and pandemic-induced societal change, PTSB realised that a fresh approach to how employee experience data was collected, understood, and actioned would allow it to better support employees through all stages of their journey.

“Permanent TSB’s purpose is to build trust with our customers – we are a community serving the community. We have a responsibility to understand the sentiment and feedback our customers share with us, and take meaningful actions to improve our customer experience. Having the ability to quickly identify pain-points through our customer’s feedback and prioritise improvements to remove friction for them has been transformational,” said Sarah Cashman, Customer Experience Manager at PTSB. “Customer experience is the golden thread that weaves through the entire organization. Team members at all levels of the organization are now looking at the same dashboards – from customer-facing teams to senior leaders, drawing on the insights in weekly ‘Customer Experience Task Force’ meetings. We are excited to see where our partnership takes us next.”

With Medallia powering PTSB’s employee experience programme, all employee engagement metrics are trending upwards. Between 2020 and 2022, employee net promoter scores (eNPS) have increased by 19 points, culture by eight, engagement by seven and trust by 10. The organisation has taken action on more than 1,000 positive changes based on employee feedback, all of which have contributed to the bank’s strategic priorities and sense of community. With the help of Medallia, PTSB is now expanding its employee listening to new touchpoints, such as onboarding, to further enhance its Every Voice Counts program. This continues to play a central role in improving the bank’s culture proposition, DEI initiatives, recognition, belonging and wellbeing strategies.

Medallia was able to conduct linkage analysis on PTSB’s data to uncover a strong connection between engaged employees and customer satisfaction. Notably, it showed a 30-point difference in customer Net Promoter Score (NPS) between branches with lower employee engagement and higher employee engagement.

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay

Customer experience is employee experience – and vice versa

 960 640 Guest Post
By:
0

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

Global government IT spending to grow 6.8%, fuelled by TX demand

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
By:
0

Worldwide government IT spending is forecast to total $588.9 billion in 2023, an increase of 6.8% from 2022, fuelled by demand for consumer-like Total Experience (TX) strategies.

“Government organizations are continuing to modernize legacy IT and invest in initiatives that improve access to digital services as constituents increasingly demand experiences that are equivalent to online customer interactions in the private sector,” said Daniel Snyder, Director Analyst at Gartner. “The total experience (TX) framework, which helps agencies manage employee and citizen interactions, is enabling transformation and will remain among the main drivers of IT spend in 2023.”

Along with improving the citizen experience and engagement, a cohesive TX strategy will help governments advance digital skills and literacy in their workforces by providing modern tools and approaches to  lessen friction in government work. Failing to build a solid TX strategy increases service friction, leading to risk of service delays and underwhelming service experiences.

In 2023, government IT spending is forecast to increase across all segments except devices, as government end-users extend the useful life of their devices that were acquired at the onset of the pandemic (see Table 1). Software will be the highest growing segment in 2023 followed by IT services and internal services.

Table 1. Worldwide Government IT Spending Forecast (Millions of U.S. Dollars)

  2021 Spending 2021 Growth (%) 2022 Spending 2022 Growth (%) 2023 Spending 2023 Growth (%)
Data Center Systems 23,110 7.0 25,042 8.4 25,156 0.5
Devices 37,520 11.6 34,794 -7.3 34,667 -0.4
Internal Services 68,469 -1.9 67,119 -2.0 68,602 2.2
IT Services 185,564 10.8 193,925 4.5 209,261 7.9
Software 148,962 16.2 162,803 9.3 183,103 12.5
Telecom Services 71,757 1.4 67,775 -5.5 68,209 0.6
Total 535,382 8.9 551,458 3.0 588,998 6.8

Source: Gartner (December 2022)

Initiatives such as migrating services to the cloud, modernizing applications, and fortifying network security are among the primary innovation priorities that governments are focused on to improve public engagement and satisfaction.

Government CIOs Will Prioritize Improved Use of Data and Digitalization Across Organizations

According to the 2023 Gartner CIO and Technology Executive Survey, digital transformation, leveraging and using data effectively and technology modernization are the top three priorities of government CIOs.

“Delivering on these priorities depends on establishing a shared, organization-wide digital vision and integrating that vision into enterprise-level strategies,” said Apeksha Kaushik, Principal Analyst at Gartner. “In alignment to these priorities, investments will increase in cybersecurity, application modernization, cloud platforms, integration technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), and business/data analytics tools.”

At the same time, CIOs will have to tackle challenges such as varying stakeholder expectations and developing action plans accordingly. “Government CIOs will need to address concerns of digital transformation with mission objectives. They need to work closely with government executives to ensure a shared understanding of vision, roadmap and linkage to mission critical priorities,” added Kaushik.

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

 960 640 Guest Post
By:
0

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.

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

 960 640 Guest Post
By:
0

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

 960 640 Guest Post
By:
0

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.

The benefits of live chat on your website

 960 640 Guest Post
By:
0

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

SMS rises up the ranks for customer communications, but are retailers are missing out on mobile?

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
By:
0

A Wunderkind survey of over 2,000 UK shoppers has revealed that while email remains the dominant channel for consumers, with 84% saying they find it the most convenient channel for communicating with retailers during the buying journey, a third (32%) say they now find text just as convenient – an increase of 6 percentage points year-on-year.

However, despite this increased consumer demand, just one in three retailers currently use text as a marketing channel (beyond purely transactional communication like delivery updates), meaning the vast majority are missing out on a huge opportunity to engage with customers, increase conversions and, ultimately, encourage a greater number of sales – especially when texts are used in careful conjunction with email.

Just over half (56%) of shoppers say they have received a text message from a brand or retailer in the last 12 months, with the same percentage (56%) saying that the speed and convenience of text as a communications channel enhanced and supported their online buying journey, whether by providing information faster than it would have been received through email, or by helping them react to a fast-changing stage in their buying journey, such as a shipping update or the option to use a discount or promotion.

This desire for text communications, Wunderkind’s research suggests, mirrors the now ubiquitous use of smartphones, with consumers increasingly wanting to interact — and buy — through their mobiles. mCommerce transactions made on smartphones and tablets are expected to represent over half (58%) of all online retail sales this year, rising to 63% by 2024, which will equate to sales of around £105 billion.

A separate poll of 60 senior UK marketing and ecommerce professionals in Wunderkind’s ‘Countdown to 2024’ report showed that just a third (34%) currently use text to communicate and engage with shoppers.

Wunderkind’s General Manager International, Wulfric Light-Wilkinson, said: “Text represents a significant opportunity for retailers to increase loyalty and drive sales. Best-in-class customer engagement isn’t about relying on any one channel – but rather, supporting the shopper on their path to purchase, and meeting them wherever they are.

“Regardless of the channel mix, consumer engagement success comes down to brands putting themselves in the shoes of current and prospective customers, understanding how they like to communicate and operate, and using that insight to build campaigns that engage them seamlessly across multiple touchpoints.”

Additionally, it is worth noting that customers engage quickly with texts, which is ideal for retailers or brands wanting to promote a flash sale or send out a time-sensitive message. Research suggests 90% of people open a text message within three minutes of receiving it, while, according to Gartner, texts have an average open rate of  98% and a response rate of 45% – much higher than email  (which has an average of 20% and 6% respectively).

Download Wunderkind’s full report: The Untapped Potential of Text.

Brands moving to digital interactions ‘leaving older consumer behind’

 960 640 Stuart O'Brien
By:
0

Older consumers are being left behind when businesses digitise their customer facing operations, requiring organisations to take a more thoughtful approach to their digital engagement to ensure inclusivity.

Findings in research by Twilio reveal that while UK consumers over 65 hold significant digital shopping power, with 76% relying on online shopping, only 12% feel understood by brands they interact with digitally.

While many in this age group are digitally-savvy, the communications options offered by businesses can often fall short of providing a reliable route to resolution, eroding trust.

Meanwhile, more accessible methods of communication, like phone or email, are also often phased out in a drive for digital transformation, without consideration for the diversity of needs from different customer groups and the complexity of some customer support situations.

Use of modern technologies like chatbots should be judicious, and businesses must digitise with consideration of every customer’s needs.

The majority of consumers in the over 65 group indicated that they find it hard to get in touch with companies, because many organisations do not design their customer engagement with the nuances of different demographics in mind. Significantly, 85% of consumers over 65 said they would rather speak to someone over the phone compared to other methods.

That said, 16% from this demographic are happy to use technology channels such as chatbots and apps to interact with brands. Businesses should therefore analyse the feedback and data customers share to ensure they offer every customer the options that best suit them.

“Trust between business and customer is crucial, particularly in challenging economic times, and building that trust with tailored, personalised communication is key,” said Sam Richardson, Principal Visioneering Consultant at Twilio. “Customer engagement needs to be inclusive in order to be effective, and good old fashioned phone calls don’t need to fall by the wayside in an effort to modernise – in fact, all age groups find them useful for chatting through more complex problems. While in-app chat and SMS are useful for delivery updates and might perfectly suit more digital-native audiences, businesses should also think about what people with accessibility needs require from them.”

Failing to cater to the over 65 demographic also represents a missed business opportunity because they make up such a prominent portion of the online retail market. The 18-24 bracket is notably more likely never to shop online compared to over 65s: only 6% of consumers over 65 said that they never do their shopping online, compared to 30% of 18-24 year olds. Similarly, over half (51%) of over 65s read or keep hold of digital marketing communications.

But a lack of consideration is creating a trust barrier with older consumers, including when it comes to marketing. Half (50%) of shoppers over 65 didn’t know where brands got their contact details from, while one in five indicated that they believe brands only care about their money. This contrasts with younger consumers, who feel more understood as an audience, but are actually not as engaged with internet purchases.

“Older demographics are clearly more interested in regular brand engagement online compared to younger consumers,” continued Richardson. “As this older age bracket continues to grow in an ageing population, brands need to be better prepared to cater to older consumers digitally. This means reflecting customer preferences in available communication methods, as well as using first-party data – data collected consensually from customers – to deliver accurate, personalised experiences that make customers feel heard and understood. Technologies like customer data platforms can translate this data into insights, and this provides businesses valuable direction as to what customers actually want.”

Though companies dedicate a lot of time to getting to know their customers, data shows that many older consumers feel overlooked by the ways businesses engage with them, which is diminishing loyalty. Only one third (32%) of respondents over 65 feel like valued customers, 15% feel that brands care about them, and only 10% feel that they represent the main target audience when it comes to marketing communications.

Twilio commissioned the research in June 2022, with Walnut UNLIMITED conducting the survey. Walnut Omnibus is a quantitative syndicated survey conducted online twice a week with a nationally representative sample of 2,000 GB adults (aged 18+). The survey was completed in two waves, with a total of 4,028 consumers participating, 806 of which were over 65.