Omnichannel Contact Centers have been around for some time now, and many retail giants have experienced significant success by adopting omnichannel customer service. So, it can surprise you that your omnichannel strategy may still have some gaps. However, the gap does exist, keeping the retail industry from earning customer loyalty and revenue.
Today, the retail industry is amid one of the largest transformations we have seen in decades. With the change in customer demand, habits, and expectations, many organizations are trying to understand where to start bridging the gap between traditional and modern retail experiences. So, let’s take an in-depth look at some of the key challenges that lead to the omnichannel gap and how a retail BPO offering customer support for retail stores can help you bridge the gap.
Why Retail Needs to Shift to Omni Channel Contact Centers
Disconnected Data Disrupting the Modern Buying Journey
Even today, the lack of unified data in a retailer’s current systems can become a significant roadblock to providing omnichannel experiences to consumers. Modern retailers often find it challenging to provide their call center for retail businesses with a single source of truth about their customers that would allow them to communicate efficiently and effectively. The siloed data affects customer communications, keeping the retail call centers from providing a superior customer experience. It also keeps the retailer from gaining real-time insights into things like customer preferences and inventory.
An omnichannel retail BPO can help retailers break down the information silo by assisting them in building a central information bank to store all customer information across all channels and touchpoints c in real-time. Modern retailers need to be able to pinpoint a customer throughout their journey to offer a personalized customer experience, which is increasingly becoming the key to a satisfied customer base. So, they need a retail BPO that can help them collate and leverage sophisticated and connected data to overcome the limitations of siloed information systems.
Complexity of legacy solutions
Many retailers have spent a lot of money on legacy solutions that lack visibility into customers’ behavioral patterns. Thus, many of these retailers wish to maximize the benefit of these investments. Unfortunately, by doing so, businesses can end up dealing with the complexity of their existing systems. Investing in a new unified solution incorporates additional visibility and integration on top of existing solutions to address the complexity issues without scraping the legacy systems.
A leading call center offering customer support for retail stores has the latest unified solution that can be seamlessly integrated into your existing operation and systems to ensure better visibility of customers’ behaviors. This allows you to gather invaluable customer insights to incorporate into your future business operations.
Inability to Adapt to Changing Customer Habits
Another barrier to omnichannel experiences is the inability to adapt to changing customer needs. This can result from not using the right technology to streamline operations by connecting all its data. Streamlining backend operations is critical to customer experience, allowing companies to adapt to rapidly changing customer behaviors and habits.
Customers today seek out reviews and other social proof before making a purchase. Social commerce sales in the U.S. were an estimated $36.62 billion in 2021. Therefore, it should not be surprising that retail businesses today must connect these social sources of demand and customer intelligence.
A call center providing truly omnichannel customer support for retail stores can help retail companies bridge the gap by streamlining their customer service across all channels and connecting the dots between different data. It will help the retail store gain important insights into customer behaviors and habits and design their customer experience strategy accordingly.
Increased Demands and Customer Expectations
Consumers today know that retailers can capture every data regarding their purchases. Most expect retailers to do so to understand their needs and demands better. As a result, retail companies face increased demands to understand consumers better and personalize each interaction for a more engaging customer experience.
Customers today want convenience in their retail experiences. According to the National Retail Federation, 97% of consumers have backed out of a purchase because it was inconvenient. To ensure customer convenience, many retail businesses today offer curbside pickup, same-day and next-day delivery, and easy returns. However, many companies still fail to provide the customer support that their customers have come to expect.
These increased demands and customer expectations can be effectively met by hiring the right call center service provider for retail store customer support. With the right omnichannel customer support provider, it is possible to meet and even exceed these increased customer expectations.
Lack of Human Connect Across All the Channels
While many retailers have embraced some form of omnichannel customer service, many still fail to offer the same level of customer engagement and connection across all channels, hindering them from providing a seamless and consistent brand experience regardless of the technology or method of communication.
A retail call center offering customer support for retail stores can help retailers overcome this issue. While the speed of response, resolution, and friendliness of representatives are some of the most critical aspects of customer experience, the increasing need for personalization and human connection cannot be ignored. With the help of an omnichannel call center for retail businesses, you can collect valuable customer insights and use them to offer better human engagement, empathy, and personalization across all channels.
Final Thoughts
As the world goes increasingly digital, customer behavior is changing rapidly. It leads to several critical challenges for retail businesses trying to earn better customer loyalty by delivering superior quality experience across all touchpoints. With an experienced call center partner providing customer support for retail stores, it is possible to overcome most of the key challenges to a seamless customer experience delivery by leveraging a combination of tech and touch. Not doing so may result in higher customer attrition due to poor CX. Therefore, taking the initiative to close the gap in your omnichannel CX delivery is essential to stay ahead of your competition and ensure future success.
