Taking a Digital-First Approach Will Help Retailers Survive an Unprecedented Holiday Shopping Season

Seasons greetings! Yes, technically it’s still autumn, but retailers are already getting into the mode of preparing for the holiday shopping season. And amid a year unlike any other, the holiday should feel particularly unique — perhaps, even daunting — as consumers continue to adapt to a largely digital-first world and brands gear up to match unprecedented online expectations.

New data even suggests that customers have been fleeing from retailers that weren’t ready to handle the digital demand. It must be said that no one knows exactly what the 2020 holiday season will entail. Annual plans and reference points have gone out the window, and shoppers are learning new behaviors every day. The only given is that retailers have revenue to make up and anxious executives awaiting results.

The best approach is to prepare for the unexpected, listen to customer signals, and adapt as quickly as possible. So, how can retailers make the most of the next few weeks before the holiday shopping floodgates open?

Plow Digital Funnels for Smooth Customer Journeys

For some brands, early on during the pandemic felt like Black Friday as new shoppers were pushed online, leading to many challenges, but also many learnings. To help strengthen their holiday season’s digital program, companies should take this time to look back and assess what needs to be done to eliminate customer friction and maintain engagement.

Retail and e-commerce brands need to take a close look at the post-pandemic digital landscape and ask themselves a few questions:

• What new customer behaviors arose these past several months? Many customers now demand a variety of fulfillment options, whether buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS); reserve online, pick up in-store (ROPIS); curbside pickup; or regular home shipment. Retailers need to ensure each channel is well equipped for the coming season.
• What was the biggest driver of service tickets? For example, if customers have been upping their complaints about the slowness of a website or native app, now is the time to investigate performance updates.
• What messaging improvements or communication gaps should be filled? Shoppers are craving clarity and speed in this new climate, and retailers should establish clear messages for different experiences, from curbside pickup alerts to any digital error messages (no more, “we’re sorry, something went wrong!").

Equip the Workshop Elves (aka Employees)

Another critical element to making online shoppers happier is making your employees’ lives easier. Companies need to invest in systems that enable automatic anomaly detection on business indicators, user experience friction, or technical errors so teams can be alerted in real time — spending less time being reactive and more time proactively improving digital properties.

However, it’s not enough to only understand pain points quickly. Internal teams need to be able to quantify the impact of friction points to help understand the number of shoppers affected and potential conversion and revenue loss.

Finally, make sure you help the helpers. When a customer submits a complaint through the call center or online survey, support teams should have the ability to instantly reproduce the user experience and put themselves in that customer’s shoes. This facilitates quicker understanding of why a customer struggled, and will enable a faster remedy.

Prepare to Pivot

As brands begin to jockey for position over the next few months, retailers are getting ready to meet unpredictable customer behaviors and shopping patterns. The most important thing they can do to meet expectations during an unprecedented holiday season is to listen to customer signals, automate as much as possible, and adapt quickly to demand. In order to do so, brands need to be set up for automated detection and real-time monitoring of unexpected, revenue impacting UX and technical issues. Furthermore, retailers should be proactively alerted to anomalous issues via communication and incident management tools used by relevant stakeholders like product, UX, engineering, and support teams.

The coming holiday season is intimidating as it's sure to be a trailblazing moment in e-commerce. However, it's also a huge opportunity. This year has already accelerated digital strategy into real transformation. Savvy and digitally minded retailers that put in the work now will find themselves investing in audiences that will become loyal and develop lasting online habits for years to come.

Mario Ciabarra is founder and CEO of Quantum Metric, a digital intelligence platform that enables modern enterprises to quickly deliver exceptional online experiences.