Original post on Customer Magazine
The exponential growth of our global digital economy has exacerbated hyper-competition within the retail industry as the market becomes increasingly saturated with ambitious companies aiming to differentiate themselves and achieve their growth targets. As competition within the market escalates and the options available to consumers continue to expand, the need to integrate comprehensive customer experiences has never been more prevalent.
Recent studies by Emplifi have suggested that most customers have begun prioritizing customer experiences when discerning between brands. Emplifi says that 86% of customers would abandon a brand after as few as two poor experiences, and 49% of consumers left a brand in just the past year due to poor customer experience. Other studies in recent years have indicated that many customers will leave a brand after just a single poor experience.
Large-scale businesses have rapidly adapted to remain at the forefront of the industry, with many focusing their efforts on integrated communication strategies that address consumer demands for reliable, efficient, and streamlined customer experiences that alleviate the inevitable frustration that arises from incoherent and fragmented customer journeys.
“To achieve this, companies must deliver a sophisticated omnichannel experience that utilizes the growing array of unique channels an organization can employ when communicating with customers,” said Jeff Li, Senior Director of Risk, Governance, Projects, and Partners, ConnX, a managed services company serving large, distributed retailers. “Coupled with extremely high-quality voice, messaging, and video communications, businesses can reach the broadest number of customers possible and improve their brands’ reputations.”
Li explained that advancements in broadband speed, computing power, and mobile technology have allowed companies to increase their usage of video and audio content when communicating through messages or across their website. This has allowed for more emancipated innovation to design more compelling tools for communications between organizations and their consumers.
“Brands prioritizing customer experience are most likely to find success in the hypercompetitive retail market as their bottom line continues to improve while competitors stagnate and fall behind,” Li said. “Our retail enterprise customers have invested in cloud-based applications that can improve experiences, but lower operating costs dramatically through more automation, a reduced need to hire more people, and the harnessing of data that can be used to deliver personalized experiences.”
With ConnX Connected Retail, retailers get end-to-end, Client-to-Cloud full-stack observability and can quickly identify and address the root cause of performance issues with a single portal view, allowing better customer service and driving increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
“We are delivering major upgrades for retailers, with real-time communications services enriched with AI at the edge and automation across our single, integrated platform, lifting the burdens of having to manage an expensive, overly-complex, and siloed legacy infrastructure,” Li explained. “This not only guarantees a higher quality of service but frees up time for their IT teams to develop new ways for customers to connect and for employees to engage, regardless of where they happen to be – in physical stores, in contact centers, working from home, and working on the go. They can stop worrying about their network and access to applications, can reduce the risks associated with their communications going down, and can instead spend time delivering consistently awesome experiences, internally and externally.”