The Economic Downturn Turns Up the Heat for Retail CX

Today, many consumers are struggling financially on some level. This is forcing retailers to keep "share of wallet" top of mind. However, staffing shortages in stores, back offices, and contact centers are giving retailers a run for the money, thwarting efforts to provide exceptional customer experiences.

Verint conducted an online survey of 2,000 U.S. consumers who had shopped at a mass market retailer from February 2022 to July 2022. The survey results validate the fiscal benefits retailers can gain from retaining customers and maintaining customer satisfaction. Ninety-one percent of consumers indicated they shop at their favorite mass market retailer at least once a month, with 83 percent spending $50 or more on average.

However, some shoppers are venturing out, trying new retail outlets in search of lower-cost alternatives and/or items that due to supply chain issues may not be readily available at their tried-and-true “regular” retailers.

Our research shows retailers that do right by these “first-time” shoppers can transform them into regular customers. Three-quarters of consumers who tried a new mass market retailer for the first time in the past six months shopped there more than once, with 90 percent of first-time shoppers making purchases at least once a month thereafter.

And there’s significant upside for those that captivate and delight these shoppers. After having an amazing customer experience (CX), 88 percent are likely to make a repeat purchase, 82 percent are likely to recommend the retailer to friends or family, 68 percent are likely to join a loyalty program, and 63 percent said they're likely to write a positive review.

Alternatively, negative customer experiences can send shoppers packing. Reasons that consumers were likely to stop purchasing from a retailer included: if a customer service issue isn’t resolved in a single attempt (62 percent), if unable to communicate in their channel of choice (57 percent), if forced to repeat themselves (55 percent), and if they have to endure long wait times (50 percent).

Customer Service Automation: Meeting Consumer Demands, Alleviating Staffing Gaps

Creating exceptional experiences should be at the heart of every retailer’s engagement strategy. However, more than 60 percent of those we surveyed say they're challenged to find qualified candidates to staff their stores, while 45 percent are struggling to fill contact center and back-office positions.

Faced with labor shortages and challenged to meet consumer demands for superior shopping experiences across numerous engagement channels, many retailers are recognizing the need for automation to improve CX and help offset staffing shortages.

For customers, automation empowers their growing preference for 24/7 self-service; retailers can also effectively scale customer engagement with automation in the following ways:

1. Automate contact center operations. Automating responses to common queries or offering FAQs or community forums relieves pressure on human agents, leaving them free to handle more complex issues, as well as lowering the cost to serve.
2. Employ intelligent hiring solutions for streamlined staff acquisition and assessment. A virtual interviewing and hiring process creates an extra layer of evaluation by pre-assessing candidates and reducing the workload on HR and hiring managers, accelerating hiring and identifying candidates with a better fit, which also improves their retention rate.
3. Lean into private messaging and automation to scale this highly personalized channel. Bots can automate the use of private messaging channels at scale for customer communications in areas such as customized offers and recommendations as well as returns.
4. Meet capacity through conversation containment. Service bots and virtual assistants can aid management of high-volume, low-effort queries, with savings in customer service costs.

At a time when customer retention is more critical than ever, leaning into automation solutions is key to retailers winning over shoppers.

Jenni Palocsik is vice president, marketing insights, experience and enablement at Verint, customer experience experts in automation, AI and cloud.