By Greg Sherry, Verint Systems
The rewards for organizations that succeed at providing omnichannel customer experience excellence are pretty significant. The winners will be those that deliver fast, easy, consistent, personalized service across every channel, every interaction, every time.
What areas should be considered as you continue to develop and execute a strategy to provide customer experience excellence in an omnichannel world? It’s critical that organizations are able to understand the experiences that customers have with your organization via the web, contact center, branch, mobile, social media, text, email and other channels. There is a tremendous amount of data — both structured and unstructured — that organizations can gather and assess across channels to gain actionable intelligence into customer sentiments and the overall customer journey. For example: with workforce costs skyrocketing, and retailers and wholesalers squeezed on margins, operational efficiency has become crucial to profitability. Some recent creative retail business operations optimization examples include:
Advertisement
Bridal Retailer Drives Revenue And Cost Savings With Customer Engagement. One of the largest bridal retailers in the world, with more than 300 stores in the North Americas, needed a way to understand the bridal universe and quickly react to customer needs, perceptions and sentiments across its product lines and footprint of stores. With this in mind, it created a voice of the customer program to engage its customers—while also gathering ideas and feedback on a variety of topics.
Voice of the customer research prior to the project launch found that calling a new brand of jewelry “extended” rather than “plus-size” would appeal to a much wider array of women. The bridal retailer effectively doubled the market potential of this new jewelry line by making subtle changes in its product positioning based on customer feedback from interaction channels. The organization also learned how to best gather and analyze customer feedback and now completes research projects three to five times faster than before. It has also realized more than $4 million in cost savings as a result of ideas it has gathered from customer engagement initiatives.
Retail Payment Process Improves Operations And Customer Retention From Customer Listening Program. This leading global provider of retail payment systems processes more than $2 billion in total transactions annually and has 3,000 agents across six contact centers located in the U.S. and Europe. The organization monitors and analyzes interactions with clients to understand the root cause of merchant attrition and improve satisfaction and business processes. Business processes include proactively identifying customers at risk of defecting across a large client base and bringing automation to a manual and slow customer retention processes. By actively listening to customer communication channels, the organization saved more than 4,500 customer accounts, equating to $12.5 million in retained revenue.
A tweet and blog posted earlier this year by Forrester Research Inc. Analyst Zia Daniell Wigder shared four key takeaways from a Forrester omnichannel retail event in New York—which focused on the state of omnichannel retail and why it’s essential for retailers.
Zia Daniell Wigder @zdwigder • Apr 3
Highlights from @peter_sheldon: Four Takeaways From An Evening Of Omnichannel Retail In New York http://bit.ly/1scqv3b
In today’s world, the winners in delivering the best customer experience will be those that provide fast, easy, consistent and personalized service. Organizations should listen to the voice of the customer by engaging with them to help drive business and workforce optimization initiatives that support omnichannel customer experience excellence.
Greg Sherry serves as VP of Marketing at Verint Systems, a global leader in Actionable Intelligence solutions. Greg has a strong background and measurable accomplishments in marketing, business development, and customer success. With a primary focus on analytics, customer experience, and customer service software and services, Greg has led teams at HP Autonomy, Aspect Software and Verizon, where his team received the annual Presidents Award based on driving measurable contributions to customer experience and business optimization. Follow Greg on Twitter: @GregSherry
