Retail shoppers will be familiar with the experience: you enter a large big box store, and before you can even gather your thoughts, you’re ambushed by an overzealous sales representative who demands to know if he can help you. Since you’re not ready to even begin looking, you decline. A half-hour later, when you really do have a question, that sales rep is nowhere to be seen. Put out an ABP (News - Alert) on Kevin the Overzealous Sales Rep.
Customers today may want live help at some point during their sales journey. But they expect to be the ones to request it when they’re ready for it, and they expect to get it within seconds. Since customers today have an ever-expanding choice in communications channels, the idea of omni-channel collaboration is becoming more popular. Customers may not even want Kevin the Overzealous Sales Rep. They may want to use a mobile app inside the store, for example. These expectations mean that companies need to upgrade their entire customer experience, according to Ben Rossi writing for Information Age.
“Improved apps that are more integrated into the store’s overall merchandising strategies and do more for consumers while in store; better, more ubiquitous Wi-Fi in stores so those apps can provide a good experience when the customer is ‘inside the box’; new or enhanced product search capabilities and delivery options; more relevant marketing and promotions; and more consistent merchandising, pricing and branding across web, catalog and storefront,” wrote Rossi.
Essentially, customers today want to blend the digital, the mobile, the Web, the telephone and the brick-and-mortar experience. This won’t be an easy task for the average company: it will mean upgrading the customer support platform to a multichannel solution that keeps a 360-degree picture of the customer at the fingertips of anyone who comes into contact with customers. This will mean massive shifts in system requirements, according to Rossi. Inventory, marketing, back-office and contact center systems will need to be blended into a seamless resource. Mobile and desktop customer experiences will need to be blended. Then, all of this will need to be made available to workers in brick-and-mortar environments.
“New in-store technologies that can facilitate customer access to web while in-store and deliver context-specific marketing and promotional messaging based on a customer’s interactions with a retailer across all channels are necessary,” wrote Rossi. “New planning, merchandising, pricing, promotion, business intelligence, customer analytics and supply chain processes must be developed to span traditionally separate organizations.”
As could be expected, a customer support overhaul of this nature won’t be cheap and it won’t be easy. But the alternative – trying to limp along with twentieth century technology in the twenty-first century and continually missing customer expectations – is even more expensive.
Edited by Maurice Nagle