By Kelly Koelliker, KANA, a Verint Company
What’s on every smart retailer’s “wish list” for the holidays this year? It’s the ability to convert today’s “showrooming” and “webrooming” customers into actual and repeat sales opportunities. Real-time, contextual customer service has become a key means for achieving this goal.
The emergence and use of digital channels (mobile, web and social) have become key sales and service channels as customers increasingly search, purchase and ask for help online. In recent years, these have also given rise to two new trends in the retail arena: showrooming and webrooming. Showrooming refers to consumers who price shop online after visiting physical stores, while webrooming refers to the process of researching products online and then visiting a store to make a purchase.
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Showrooming and webrooming represent important shifts in how consumers shop and warrant serious planning and strategy to ensure you’re on the “right side” of this trend. Savvy retailers understand that by providing a truly integrated customer experience across all channels, they no longer need to fear webrooming and showrooming. Instead, they can view it as a tremendous opportunity to provide a more personalized shopping experience and to unite the physical and digital retail worlds.
Here are three ways customer service technology can assist in this regard:
Live Chat lets online and in-store customers chat with agents over the web or a mobile device to get assistance. Real-time text chat sessions can provide step-by-step guidance to shoppers. Retailers can also leverage live chat to monitor customer shopping activities and proactively offer assistance, as well as dynamically present targeted offers that can increase sales.
Co-Browse enables a contact center agent to jointly view the same web page with a shopper and guide the shopper through processes, such as the online checkout process, shipping options, and even help locate a product on a site. To date, co-browsing can emulate the face-to-face and in-store experience online — and is especially beneficial for retailers selling high-value and complex products, where cart abandonment can be especially costly.
Smart Engagement helps route the right shopper to the right resource to help complete the purchase. Apps that ask shoppers, “What do you need help with today?” can help complete transactions online with assistance, or “ping” an in-store sales associate to come to a shopper’s aid.
These proactive and preemptive means of customer service enable retailers to leverage showrooming/webrooming to their advantage. Retailers can benefit from the efficiency of online ordering with in-store pickup by offering coupons and discounts for consumers who visit your web site and buy in store to motivate a purchase.
As well, new and emerging technologies are destined to be harnessed to improve the customer experience and connect digitally with shoppers. Retailers are already beginning to use digital beacon-equipped mannequins to provide customers with a more engaging retail experience. When a customer with an enabled smartphone app is within a 50 meters of the mannequin, the beacon sends a signal providing useful information, such as details about the clothes and accessories the mannequin is wearing, the price, where the items can be found within the store and links to purchase the items directly from the retailer’s web site.
Real-time customer service is no longer nice to have; it’s an imperative. But to achieve this, retailers must be able to merge online and in-store customer purchase history across channels and also empower sales associates, customer service agents, and self-serve channels with knowledge at the ready to assist shoppers.
And, as with any use of multiple channels, it’s incumbent upon the retailer to put all context together so that interactions are complete, consistent and contextual. It is context that helps retailers discern exactly what resources best meet the needs of each shopper. Organizations must understand — in what situations is a channel most appropriate.
Many organizations have architected their customer service infrastructure with a web or a call center mentality — approaches that can limit an organization’s vision and its ability to address the full range of customer needs. It’s important to think holistically about channels and to adopt a “customer mentality” that is all about optimizing user experience, and especially so in the showrooming/webrooming era.
Kelly Koelliker is Director of Product Marketing for KANA®, A Verint® Company. KANA helps global organizations optimize their engagements with consistent and contextual customer journeys across employee, web, social and mobile experience so they can improve brand loyalty.
