In today's hyper-competitive retail landscape, offering excellent products and services isn’t enough any more to get ahead of the competition—and stay there. To truly stand out and thrive, retailers must adopt a customer-centric approach and implement best practices to eliminate factors that cause friction and undermine customer confidence.
This article will discuss some retail best practices, valuable insights, and helpful steps for creating a results-driven customer experience strategy. We'll also point out key pitfalls to avoid and guide you toward measurable results. Whether you’re a seasoned retailer or new to the market sector, this information can help you deliver shopping experiences that delight customers and drive business growth.
Why Support Customers With Strategy?
When customers have limitless options, providing exceptional customer experience (CX) is no longer an option—it’s a requirement for businesses that want to thrive. It's critical that customers have memorable experiences with your brand, whether they shop online or in-person. These positive experiences are essential for developing long-term relationships and cultivating brand loyalty.
To generate favorable CX, more brands are turning to a retail customer experience strategy for guidance. A finely tuned strategy can be integral to fostering customer relationships and helping retailers improve various aspects of the customer journey—from initial engagement to post-purchase interactions.
The best of these strategies generate measurable results, including an increase in recurring revenue from satisfied customers who make repeat purchases and become loyal customers. Such positive experiences foster strong customer relationships, thereby reducing churn to retain valuable clients. Finally, exceptional experiences generate positive word-of-mouth marketing and referrals when loyal customers turn into brand advocates.
To enjoy these benefits in full, a company must first assess its current situation to improve future customer journeys. Fortunately, there are some tried-and-true methods to help streamline this process. Below, we'll cover specific best practices for the retail industry.
A Retail Customer Experience Strategy: Best Practices
Developing an effective CX strategy requires careful consideration of your current setup, goals and resources before incorporating best practices that yield positive results. To help you navigate this process more easily, we’ve compiled a table that outlines the best practices as well as frictions to avoid.
The best practices checklist addresses the “dos and don’ts,” encompassing elements such as important customer touch points, proactive customer support, and data-driven decisions. Use this checklist to identify areas of CX improvement and drive retail success.
Retail Customer Experience Strategies Checklist |
|
Best Practices To Implement |
Frictions To Avoid |
|
|
After reviewing the checklist, consider your current setup and any contributing factors that could cause poor results. You should also evaluate what works well for your company and consider what needs to be improved. Understanding your current strengths and limitations will help you set the right goals for the future.
Take Action on Your New Strategy
If you’ve narrowed down the areas of the CX journey that need improvement, it’s time to take action. First, define clear goals and objectives that align with your brand's values and customer expectations. What specific outcomes do you want? Setting goals from the beginning will help you stay focused and track your progress.
To implement and maintain your new strategy, you should also take into consideration the financial and human resources available to you. Knowing exactly what resources you can commit will help you prioritize initiatives based on their potential impact and alignment with your goals. Remember that a well-planned strategy that conforms to available resources will put you on a path to long-term success.
We've included a list of starting points below to help you improve CX by maximizing technology with artificial intelligence (AI), leveraging customer demographics and personalizing communications with a CMS, exploring Cloud-based solutions, and more. These actionable steps can help you develop a customer-centric strategy that resonates with your target audience and produces exceptional results.
Technology |
Customer Demographics |
|
|
Convenient Shopping Options |
Customer Feedback & Metrics |
|
|
Concord’s Record of Success
Creating a successful customer experience strategy can be a challenging process, which is why you should work with a highly-experienced consultancy like Concord. Partnering with experts is a game-changing strategy that affords your company access to specialized industry knowledge and unlocks opportunities for future success.
Concord specializes in customer-driven innovation for retail brands, transforming the customer experience and cultivating brand loyalty with AI technology and data science. Whether B2C, B2B, Marketplace, or anything in-between, we are experts at developing connected commerce solutions to increase digital and in-store revenue.
Our consulting services rely on data collection to help clients better understand and connect with existing customers while simultaneously attracting new ones. Our experts create connected commerce solutions that seamlessly blend physical and digital experiences and enable our clients to stay ahead of retail trends and offer frictionless customer experiences.
Incorporating Concord consulting services means leveraging professional expertise and guidance to set you apart in the market. Let us drive the growth of your retail business to new heights. For more information about our services, read our recent case study about accelerating customer-driven innovation in an uncertain economic climate.
Getting Started
Concord USA is a consultancy that combines technology and industry depth with a get-it-done culture to enable resiliency, efficiency, and innovation. Whether you are trying to improve customer satisfaction, data strategies, security, or other technological issues, Concord can help.
Contact us today to learn more about how to build a retail customer experience strategy, our Technology Integration Services, and how we can help your business thrive.