Ecommerce has revolutionized retail shopping, with consumers trading in the poorly lit dressing room experience for the comfort of our own bedrooms. For some, however, this trade-off comes at the price of navigating frustrating and, at times, confusing return policies. With return policies differing from brand to brand, it can be exhausting for customers to keep track and often leads to more hassle than reward.
Return policies have become a massive priority for consumers when deciding where to shop. A recent study from Happy Returns reported that 86% of shoppers check a retailer’s return strategy before buying, yet many retailers have been tightening return policies to try and offset losses. Instead, returns should be viewed as an opportunity to create a positive experience for a customer, leading to a loyal customer base and long-term ROI.
Why Returns are the Key to Customer Retention and Loyalty
Returns too often have a negative connotation among retailers, and without a change in the narrative they will lose the ability to build a loyal customer base. Narvar research found that 95% of consumers would buy from a brand again if they had a satisfactory return experience, and flexible return policies take the worry out of a customer’s decision-making process. So even if retailers have to report a few more write-downs, the long-term revenue from flexible return policies far outweighs the momentary loss.
Companies that invest in a personalized customer service (CS) program will see improvement in both savings and revenue, despite the loss on returns. In fact, it costs businesses 5X more to attract a new customer than it does to retain existing ones, not to mention that increasing customer retention by just 5% can improve sales by 25% to 95%.
Advertisement
Providing a flexible return policy with a seamless return process is instrumental in creating loyal customers, especially when they can use tools like self-service portals to make the process even easier. The key to creating a seamless self-service experience is to provide a blend of AI-assisted and real-life service agent interactions to make the process as quick and easy as possible.
The Perfect Marriage: Self-Service and Personalized Customer Service
Recent research shows that 76% of customers prefer to help themselves, especially with a simpler request such as navigating return policies or initiating a return. Self-service presents a great opportunity for brands to allow customers to help themselves in a way that benefits the brand, the customer and the service agent — it creates a seamless customer service experience for the customer while freeing up service agents’ time to handle more complex issues.
Services like ChatGPT have become increasingly popular and have helped brands get more comfortable with generative AI, but automated self-service cannot be a catchall. AI tools like ChatGPT can expand how customers utilize self-service, but it simply isn’t enough to handle all customer interactions and often leads to more frustration. Instead, combining chat agents and generative AI tools can lead to a more seamless and efficient experience all around.
Self-service portals must have the capability to easily elevate customers to a live service agent when a problem becomes too complex for automation or when a live service would be more valuable. As the AI solution passes the customer along, it must provide the agent with context from the interaction in order to provide an easier experience for the agent on the backend and to keep customers from having to repeat themselves and feel like they’re starting the process from the beginning.
Imagine you’re on your favorite brand’s website checking out the new inventory when you realize your last purchase from this same brand ran small. Ideally, you should be able to initiate a chat to return your order without ever leaving the site. And once authenticated, the AI chatbot should be able to completely resolve your return.
But say this return is a bit more complicated than that, so you click to chat with a live agent. In this new, ideal world all the context of your return, who you are, etc. seamlessly arrives on the live agent’s screen, providing the agent a glimpse into who you are and why you need help with your return — all without you ever repeating yourself. From here, the agent provides you with a highly personalized experience helping you return your order and move on with your day.
An example of this would be an AI chatbot for an ecommerce store website. If a customer has a complex issue such as a problem with a return, the AI chatbot is able to pass on the customer’s information and details from their conversation to the live service agent to provide them with context prior to speaking with the customer. This makes it easier for the agent to help the customer quickly and eliminates the need for the customer to repeat their issue, increasing customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Good customer service is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Instead, brands need to create the perfect harmony of self-service automation and a personalized customer service experience to take something simple like a return and create a loyal customer. By investing in quality CS software, brands can take advantage of a touch point like a return to impress a customer enough to bring them back time and again.
Jason Finkelstein is the Chief Marketing Officer at Gladly, a customer service platform helping the world’s most loved brands deliver loyalty through radically personal customer service. He is a five-time CMO with experience at high-growth startups and both private and public SaaS businesses including AdRoll, Traitify (acquired by Paradox), AVG Technologies (acquired by Avast) and Location Labs (acquired by AVG). He is also a Co-founder of Numa and serves as a go-to-market advisor for several B2B SaaS businesses.
