Our Director of Operations, Colin Gittens, spoke to Retail Week about something rarely discussed – how providing an outstanding customer experience can’t come at all costs for retailers and how brands can deliver sustainable CX value.
He discussed how having the right customer service technology in place to fully support agents can help them do more with less, saying:
The very best approaches will be built on ‘digital orchestration’ – assigning each customer contact to the right touchpoint with the right degree of technological involvement. Done well, this unlocks value for brands by helping both lower cost per contact, and increasing customer spend and loyalty.
He talked about the varying degrees of automating certain elements of the customer journey and the blend of technology with the human touch.
Using the latest generation of AI-powered chatbots, for example, can help brands both protect the valuable time and resources of human agents so that they can focus on the most value-added, complex queries, while still offering a fast, always-on solution. In many cases, customers might actually prefer to have ‘self-serve’ options like these when it comes to simple queries such as store opening times.
This blended approach can bring some of the biggest benefits for retailers, to provide personalisation opportunities and deliver customer insights and next best actions to agents in real time, to really improve the service quality, and provide further sales and retention opportunities.
You can read the full Retail Week article here and download our recent retail report looking into this and other industry challenges and opportunities, with expert views from John Lewis, ASOS.com and Papier here.
