What’s at the top of consumers’ wish lists this holiday season? A seamless service experience.
Retailers and consumer brands are in for a treat this year thanks to how the holidays line up. With Christmas falling 32 days after Thanksgiving, shoppers have an extra day to make purchases compared to 2016. Christmas Day also lands on a Monday instead of a Sunday this year, giving consumers another full weekend to squeeze in some last-minute shopping. With all of this extra time, it’s no surprise that holiday sales are expected to increase, reaching up to $682 billion in the United States alone.
What may surprise some, however, is how quickly the shift from in-store to online shopping is occurring. Gone are the days of finding parking spots in crowded lots, waiting in long lines to pay, and waking up at 3 a.m. to stand outside a store to take advantage of Black Friday deals. Nowadays, consumers are more inclined to roll over in bed, grab their smartphone or tablet, and purchase the same in-store holiday deals from the comfort of home.
In fact, according to the National Retail Federation, non-store sales are expected to rise 11% to 15% to roughly $140 billion in 2017. Another telltale sign that this consumer trend is gaining momentum is the reduction in holiday workers being hired. Macy’s, for example, recently announced it will drop from 83,000 to 80,000 in-store holiday workers while concurrently increasing staff for its online business by 20%.
Embracing the Emerging Consumerist Nirvana
With the holiday season such a crucial period, accounting for as much as one-third of companies’ annual sales, it’s important to have a thoughtful strategy in place to meet the new consumer demands. Relying on growth from a single channel like in-store sales is an unsustainable proposition, especially when you factor in our increasingly digitized society.
Savvy and successful brands understand this and the value they derive from accommodating their customers’ desire to shop where they want, how they want and when they want. This means asking some big questions like: “Are we ready to handle the influx of sales, returns and customer service requests on and across all channels? Are we equipped to delight each and every customer, regardless of how they choose to interact with our brand? Do we have the ability to transform them from a one-time or first-time customer into a repeat and loyal brand ambassador?”
The best way to meet these heightened expectations is by delivering an omnichannel experience. This not only means providing customers with multiple ways to connect with your brand, whether by phone, email, chat or social media, but that these channels are interconnected, enabling the consumer to seamlessly traverse as many as are needed to complete their research and make purchase decisions.
IoT: Connecting During the Holidays Has New Meaning
To provide the best customer experience this holiday season, another piece of the puzzle is being aware of consumer shopping trends. No surprise, IoT-enabled (Internet of Things) devices are at the top of the list. The National Retail Federation says popular purchases will be Apple devices, video games and connected home devices and appliances.
These IoT-enabled services, products and applications and their mounting popularity have exposed new customer service challenges that are best-handled in an omnichannel environment. This is due to the need to manage devices and services across multiple vendors and suppliers in addition to the multitude of channels available for support.
IoT-specific issues can range from determining who to contact to how to optimize a customer’s product experience. Indeed, IoT-related problems can quickly reach the limits of the decision tree, requiring skilled agents who can think creatively and cope with unusual contexts. Not only must they understand the supported application, but they must also be well-versed in the ecosystem of devices, services and software that surround that application, and how they all interact.
Making the Jump to Omnichannel
It’s estimated that today’s consumers use an average of five digital devices to make a single purchase. Brands need to ensure that their customer care is designed to meet those expectations. The payoff is significant. A shopper who buys in-store and online is the most valuable kind of customer. According to IDC, these shoppers have a 30% higher lifetime value than single-channel shoppers. Additionally, brands that successfully execute an omnichannel strategy retain on average 89% of their customers compared to only 33% for single or disconnected multichannel brands.
Given the importance of omnichannel, perhaps the next big question is: “How can I make the jump?”
Assessing Omnichannel Readiness
The first step for brands looking to pursue an omnichannel strategy is to assess organizational readiness. Figure out where you are today in comparison with where you want to be and determine what resources you need to get you there. Figure 1 illustrates the key elements of an omnichannel transition.
In the past, omnichannel discussions revolved largely around technology. Although important, I would argue that people take precedence, since many technology considerations rely on strategic decisions best made by experienced IT staff with executive buy-in and support to purchase and implement. Additionally, any technology you deploy will require a skilled team of frontline agents to extract its full range of benefits.
To assess human capital readiness, look at whether you have or are recruiting the right talent—agents with complex skill sets around problem-solving and technological expertise—and that your culture supports an exceptional employee experience. A people-first culture will help retain tenured, knowledgeable and inspired individuals who are empowered to own the customer experience from start to finish across all channels. These engaged employees will, in turn, drive higher Net Promoter Scores (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT) and likelihood to recommend (L2R) results.
When determining your technology needs, always keep the customer experience at the forefront. With artificial intelligence and advanced analytics tools, you can see a customer’s interactions across all channels and predict what the customer will need or ask for next. You must also look at standardizing and integrating various consumer datasets across channels that will provide 360-degree feedback and insight. As a result, you can be proactive and preemptive, ideally solving problems for customers before they even know they have a need.
Implementing Your Omnichannel Vision
Stephen Case, co-founder of AOL, once said, “A vision without the ability to execute is probably a hallucination.” Achieving omnichannel success requires executional courage in addition to the right organizational structure and technology. This means prioritizing investments in the people, processes and technology that will get you there.
Critical success factors in this regard include training and empowering agents to build and sustain the right talent model to enhance customer satisfaction while also improving long-term margins by reducing agent churn; implementing and monitoring newly developed organizational and people KPIs to ensure you are moving toward your goals; and integrating systems from all channels and augmenting them with analytics and automation to focus on the customer experience and increase customer delight.
Measuring post-omnichannel implementation should also be part of your roadmap. With multiple touchpoints converging, driving both business and customer outcomes, it can be challenging. The key is to evaluate a holistic set of touchpoints along the customer journey to give you the “big picture,” while simultaneously tracking channel-specific metrics to effectively pinpoint the root cause of a customer’s challenge at any point. Newer metrics like impressions, conversion rate from impressions to contacts, profit per contact, and customer effort score are just a few of the KPIs that better support an omnichannel strategy.
Reduced operational costs, revenue growth and long-term profitability are also critical measures. Successfully executing an omnichannel customer experience oftentimes includes the evolution of fulfillment and supply chain strategies as companies respond to the changing marketplace. It also offers unequaled upsell and cross-sell opportunities if your customer service representatives clearly understand their customers’ contexts and have the right technology and analytics to provide the right data at the right time.
Omnichannel: The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come
Whether you think of the holidays as the giving season, the return season or the more connected season, brands need to be prepared for an influx of all types of customer service interactions in order to make a lasting positive impression. An offering with separated, isolated channels with limited visibility across the various channels is no longer sufficient. Whether through in-house employees or a trusted partner who can bring the global horsepower, experience and resources to help achieve your customer experience ambitions, omnichannel is and will continue to be the optimum strategy to delight your customers today and into the future.