Customer experience in retail can be a challenge. Online sales have grown 44% in the last two years. However, leading retail companies continue to grow beyond digital commerce, becoming a benchmark for other industries in the digital and omnichannel realm.
That’s because survival in today’s economic climate and the competitiveness of the retail industry requires more than just low prices and innovative products. To compete with digital-first companies, retailers must deliver irresistible experiences at every touchpoint and with every product or service the customer engages with.
Customer experience management (CXM) is the active ingredient needed to thrive in today’s digital marketplace, while still offering the proven combination of compelling products, pricing and locations.
The four pillars of customer experience management
Unfortunately, two-thirds of Adobe customers report not having a clear CXM strategy. One study revealed that only 30% of consumers believe that today’s companies are “customer-centric” in their sales and marketing approach.
Many retail customers are legitimately overwhelmed. Because CXM is a relatively new, global, technology-driven operation that touches a dozen different departments, retailers are struggling to know where to start. Many of them are unsure how to unify their data, create a central repository of content, automate delivery across all customer touch points, and orchestrate their outreach at the right time and place-what we call the four pillars of CXM.
In our experience, those who do so enjoy 60% higher lifetime customer value and 2-3x revenue growth. However, mastering these four pillars requires a good understanding of some of the best practices that will help achieve true omnichannel success.
Four best practices for customer experience management success
Adopt a data-driven mindset. Since data is the lifeblood of any successful CXM program, it’s important to identify specific KPIs at each stage of the customer journey (both online and offline). Then create a single source of information – or unified database – so that all touchpoint teams have that data. For example, training store employees on online search and shopping behavior is a great way to personalize in-store experiences.
Expand and adapt personalization efforts. Once the new privacy regulations begin in 2023, third-party cookies will cease to exist. To continue to engage customers with the right message on the right device at the right time, companies will need to invest heavily in source data strategies to feed their unified data sets. As an extension of point number one, they will need to reinvent their data to thrive in a cookie-free future.
Improve content velocity. With the right data available to the right people, you’ll need to redesign content workflows between your creative and retail teams to move quickly from information to action. This step includes a central content repository (or system of record), automated delivery of unified content across all customer touch points, and A/B testing. In other words, you will need to develop digital assets for each product color and SKU to scale your personalization efforts.
Achieve leadership alignment. Getting the entire enterprise to commit to a robust CXM strategy is a top priority. Currently, many CXM professionals still work in siloed departments and fail to get other teams or touch points involved. In that framework, CXM will never work as intended unless leaders communicate a customer-first strategy to all stakeholders in sales, marketing, customer service, IT and senior management.
To achieve higher lifetime values, lower customer churn, improved reputation, lower service costs and greater engagement, retailers must adopt a robust CXM strategy and ensure it extends to their people, processes and technologies. Having helped hundreds of leading companies with their CXM efforts over the past decade, we understand how to unify customer data, awaken all touch points and deliver irresistible customer experiences.
Source: Adobe Blog