Customer service is more important than ever with 73% of business leaders reporting a measurable increase in queries over the past year and three quarters predicting a volume uplift over the next year, according to Zendesk’s CX Trends 2023 report.
New technology is offering retailers opportunities to deliver better service, but where should they focus to meet customers’ ever-evolving expectations?
Executives from businesses including Sainsbury’s, Co-op, M&S, AB InBev and Ann Summers gathered to determine just that at Retail Gazette’s latest roundtable, in partnership with customer support software firm Zendesk.
One thing all around the table agreed on was that customer expectations were getting higher when it comes to service, particularly online.
Ben Rawlings, strategic account director at Zendesk, said: “All customers have been socially conditioned by the likes of Apple, Google, Netflix, Airbnb.
“They have disrupted industries by being really easy for customers. They are now market leaders, and that’s the level of customer service and customer journey we all have to live up to.”
However, the retailers at the event believed it was important to nail down what your business wants to be known for when it comes to service.
One grocery retailer said: “It’s about getting really specific on how you want to differentiate yourself because service can mean a lot of different things. Do you want your colleagues to be proactive and helpful? Do you want to be food loving? What do you want to be known for as a brand?”
“You need that really cemented and agreed at the top and make sure that everyone is aligned and behind that idea.”
Information sharing
One thing that all in the room were unified on is that data and information sharing is key to great service.
Rawlings said that customer service agents need to be armed with a single view of the customer so they can better understand and serve them.
This includes knowing what they have been searching for or what help pages they have visited before they speak to an online advisor.
“If agents have an understanding of the customer, they can personalise and tailor that customer service,” he said.
Additional data and information on everything from store availability to courier tracking details to product information can not only help agents give customers an easy, slick experience, it can also spur additional sales.
Rawlings said: “Customer service is not just a cost. It can pay for itself and even be a key revenue generating part of the business.”
Driving sales from customer services is an approach that some retailers around the table have already adopted.
The customer experience director of one beauty retailer has set up a private shopping team to drive sales from its customer service team.
However, it is important that staff not only have information about stock and delivery but are experts in product.
The customer experience director said that her agents have training by the beauty brands it sells so they can speak to customers with knowledge.
Using customer insight in business decisions
The information sharing needs to go two ways. As much as customer services need key business information to be able to serve – and sell – to shoppers, the wealth of information they collect about customers can fuel big business decisions.
The fashion online trading and marketing boss said the customer services team holds valuable information into what the customer likes and what frustrates them.
However, she said much of the information that her customer service team holds is not shared widely across the company.
“We’ve got so many disparate systems telling me different things and we haven’t got the right people looking at it centrally,” she said.
“We need to get everybody to think about the customer because at the moment we’re very much in our silos of product and tech and digital.”
Insight from online customer service might not be shared widely however each interaction is widely recorded.
The retailers around the table flagged that it is more difficult to collect similar insights from in-store shoppers with little uptake from customer surveys.
One grocery retailer said: “I’m quite surprised by how sluggish we’ve been in gaining customer service insight from our physical stores. It feels to me an area that is absolutely ripe for innovation.
“If you catch customers at that point where they’ve had an issue, and they’re in the middle of their shopping journey, people will be more likely to give you feedback.”
She pondered whether technology such as QR codes on shelves or biometics could help aid this in store.
New technology and personalisation
Technology is increasingly playing a role in customer service with AI-powered chatbots now very much mainstream.
Very.co.uk said back in 2021 that its chatbot had become its largest customer service channel and answered more than a quarter of a million queries a month
Zendesk VP of enterprise sales Ashish Silodia said the success of technology such as chatbots comes from making it as easy and seamless for customers.
“If it’s easy then they will use the technology. If it’s painful and the chat goes off five times in the browser, then it’s not useful and it’s a bad experience,” he said.
Like many across industry, the retailers in the room excitedly debated the impact that ChatGPT could have on their sector.
The ecommerce manager of one fashion retailer said: “Integrating Chat GPT into chatbots could help us boost personalisation and help improve our Chatbot, which we know at our business doesn’t always give our customers the right answer.”
Personalisation is an aim several retailers at the event were trying to achieve and that can cover communicating with the customer via their preferred channel, to giving advice based on past history and even offering product recommendations.
The fashion ecommerce manager said: “In the support journey there’s still this massive opportunity to recommend things that we know customers want and make it a really personalised journey.”
Silodia pointed out that the single view of the customer is the cornerstone of personalised service. This requires retailers to capture everything the customer has done, across every touch point in one readily available place.
He explained that both customer service agents and technology can use this information.
However, Silodia pointed out: “You need technology and AI to do all these things at scale and I think that’s where it’s heading. Retail will continue to get hyper-personalised.”
The grocery retailer agreed that truly great service and digital innovation rests on the single customer view.
“We need to be investing in that single view of the customer because that’s the enabler for all of the brilliant stuff we can do with personalisation both online and in the store environment,” she said.
“We could have someone walk into store and have a digital screen that welcomes them and says ‘Hey, you’re looking for offers on school uniforms today’.
“But for that to happen we need to get the basics right now. That will enable all the innovation in the future,” she surmised.
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