Digital dominance is a familiar tune for the retail industry! And 2023 is expected to continue the social and online trends that the pandemic pushed into hyperdrive. Let’s look at a few recent stats:

According to Think with Google’s Consumer Insights,

According to Deloitte’s 2021 holiday season recap, shoppers had already started to return to in-person shopping. And they also increased shopping for in-person events like parties, excursions, travel, dining, and more.

Google reports that searches for “open now near me” have grown worldwide by over 400% yearly.

In short, shoppers expect a frictionless experience from Instagram to brand websites, in-store shopping, and customer support.

According to Google’s Consumer Insights report, 40% of U.S. shoppers said they planned to start holiday shopping earlier in 2022. Some shoppers even said they started holiday shopping during the summer.

What does this mean for e-commerce? It means the holiday shopping season is getting longer – and bigger. Scaling your CX staffing up and down according to customer demand just got more complicated. And the competition is fiercer than ever.

Loyalty programs have become a leading source of new customer acquisition and long-term customer loyalty. With inflation and supply chain concerns, consumers seem more willing than ever to sign up for memberships if they ensure access to discounts and scarce products.

According to Deloitte, during the 2021 holiday retail season:

Customer service is so essential to e-commerce success that it almost goes without saying. But we’ll say it – over and over again!

The UK’s Institute of Customer Service found that customers can spend up to $65 more per transaction. Companies must ensure a seamless customer experience workflow and top-notch training and support for customer service representatives.

Whether customers are speaking to a representative in-store, contacting you via phone, or interacting with a chatbot on your website, customer service should be accessible, accurate, fast, and friendly. Prioritizing excellent customer service through the right tools and the right team can help your brand build loyalty through every interaction.

According to Google’s consumer reports, 49% of customers globally say they have done more shopping online in the past year.

Shopping is online, on social media, and in-store. Customers shop from their couch, bed, office, and commute. And with each shopping experience, customers expect to pick up where they left off and have ease built into every part of the journey. They expect it all to feel like one continuous conversation.

In other words, a “frictionless” shopping experience isn’t a luxury anymore; it’s an expectation. For e-commerce brands, it’s a strategy. You know it as “omnichannel.” Customers know it as “convenient.”

By integrating live voice, chat, and email response services, brands can deliver just-in-time, personalized, interactive assistance that increases online sales, improve CSAT, and serve customers more efficiently.

Excellent customer experience is all about understanding what your customer wants. Are they seeking a high-touch, VIP shopping encounter? Or do they prefer the “Amazon” experience of low-touch, fast, convenient service?

Nuance Enterprise surveyed global consumers and found that

Put your customer in the driver’s seat by developing a rich knowledge base and FAQ that enables customers to resolve issues themselves. User-friendly interfaces and omnichannel solutions can reduce call volume and free up your team while driving customer satisfaction at the same time.

While automation can seem cold or inhuman, it can increase the level of connection that customers feel to your brand. After all, chat automation can address far more customer needs than one person, and customers leave feeling heard and having solutions.

Automation helps brands connect with customers at scale and build an impression that lasts.
Here are a few key areas we recommend automating:

• Order tracking and updates
• Product recommendations
• Sizing or style questions
• Inventory updates
• Product recommendations
• Upselling and cross-selling opportunities
• Website support

Every leader in e-commerce knows: the holidays are the time to scale up! But scaling your team can be a nightmare of temporary contracts, unskilled workers, and customer satisfaction slumps. And with peak holiday seasons starting sooner and lasting longer, scaling can be a mammoth undertaking.

One of the best solutions to the problem of scale is to outsource your customer experience to an expert. Outsourcing your contact center costs less than hiring in-house and provides highly skilled customer service representatives who can ramp up or down quickly.

At ROI CX Solutions, we have decades of experience consulting with retail and e-commerce brands to help them scale for peak seasons, no matter when you need help.

With one of our clients, we helped them expand their CX for greater stability through the year and provide the ability to scale from 60 full-time agents up to 250 agents within a month, as needed.

Remember these stats from Deloitte? During the 2021 holidays,

Loyalty programs work – and customers who join loyalty programs do shop and purchase more, which is all the more reason to strengthen your loyalty program ahead of economic downturns.

But loyalty programs often become too complex for customers, or companies don’t track the correct data to make the program valuable. The key to a loyalty program that drives results is in-depth data, streamlined customer experience, and personalized customer support.

Here’s a simple example of a loyalty strategy. We implemented a loyalty treatment to an interactive voice response software with one of our retail partners. When the system recognizes customers as loyalty members, they automatically skip the IVR menu and become a priority in the queue.

With simple strategies to recognize loyal customers, we helped our partner lower attrition rates across the board in just one quarter.

In the words of Jeff Bezos,

If we want to have 20 million customers, then we want to have 20 million ‘stores.’ …Our mission is to be the earth’s most customer-centric company.

Personalization is applying data to each touchpoint of your customer’s journey to feel they have a relationship with your brand. You can personalize everything from email headings to cross-selling recommendations to Instagram ads.

Peak shopping seasons are critical to collect rich data on your new and returning customers. Use that data to inform your strategy and boost performance. You can then use those insights to make every customer touchpoint feel unique to each customer.

Google says that companies who use first-party data for their marketing strategy have achieved up to nearly 3X more revenue and a 1.5X increase in cost savings.