Retail is a complex business. There are many different types of retail business and the entire marketplace has been reshaped by the growth of e-commerce over the past couple of decades. E-commerce in the US alone grew by 7.6% last year and now represents almost a quarter of all retail sales.
This is why retail brands need to think in-depth about their relationship with customers. Designing a fantastic customer experience is how they will drive increased sales, reduce refunds, increase loyalty and advocacy, and grow their business. A customer service strategy should be driven by all these factors – growing the business and increasing customer satisfaction.
To provide the level of service that modern customers expect a retail brand must be able to offer service that is always available when the customer needs help. The service must also be reliable and high quality, with knowledgeable agents or systems. In short, it needs to be both simple and convenient, but also seamless and scalable.
We are in Q4 at present and so Black Friday and the Holiday season will be in focus for most retail companies. It’s simple to find one disaster story after another when browsing how retail brands handle this time of year. This story on LinkedIn describes how multiple retailers took weeks to respond to a customer request for information – a customer reaching out and saying ‘I want to buy a product from you, but I have a question first…’
Just imagine not responding to a customer who is trying to buy a product, all because the service team is just too busy over Black Friday.
The problem for many retail brands is that the size of their customer service team is relatively static. Some may hire temporary workers to boost the service team during Q4. Some may ban vacations and insist on extra overtime. But, whether the support function is in-house or handled by a customer service specialist, it’s hard to handle such a busy period.
How can you focus on any strategic improvements when the only real focus of the customer service strategy is ensuring there are enough people to cope with the volume of customer enquiries? Your management team should be looking at how to improve productivity, CSAT, customer loyalty, and reducing refunds, but they are worried about overtime costs. How does that drive business growth?
The answer is to think differently about the customer service process.
By creating a multilayered solution with industry specialists it is possible to create a far more flexible solution that has the knowledge and insight you need.
How does this look?
Imagine a donut. You have the filling in the center. That’s the core. You always need this core – so think of this as the full-time customer service team you need to provide service at the volume that is typical for your company.
The overall size of the donut might be variable though. You may need far more customer service support in Q4 – and some other peaks throughout the year. You can create a bench of talent who are trained and able to serve your customers, but are not on the team full-time.
This is Gig CX. The enormous advantage of having this pool of talent is that you can find people located anywhere, because they will work from home. They can also choose the hours they work, based on your customer service manager indicating which shifts are available.
So they are working from home and they are choosing their own hours, plus they are choosing which brands they want to support. This means that you can find some really talented people who just don’t want to work full-time. They may have children or other caring responsibilities – people have many reasons to prefer flexible work.
If you are a fashion retailer, you can find people who love fashion and would be great on your customer service team. If you are selling tools and home equipment then you can get people that have spent years in construction. Whatever your retail niche is, once you start looking for people who can work flexibly then these skills can be found.
Movate calls this Directly OnDemand.
Retailers today need knowledgeable customer service representatives, but they also need far more flexibility than has traditionally been available from customer service operations. Directly OnDemand allows retail brands to have a core full-time team in addition to using a flexible platform that gives access to thousands of Gig CX experts.
Why are retail executives still worrying about their customer support over Black Friday, rather than focusing on serving as many customers as possible?
A Movate solution can combine AI automation, to ensure that simple customer questions are immediately handled 24/7 in addition to offering tools to help personalize the customer experience. Escalation to agent support can immediately follow if the customer needs additional help and the agent can be from the full-time team or the gig team – it doesn’t matter because the customer still gets the same great experience.
Is your support team filled with specialists and even fans of your brand? If not then why not explore Directly OnDemand and see how a flexible platform can be seamlessly integrated into a traditional customer support operation. We already do this for 5 of the top 20 global retail giants.
Could we help you too?
For more information on Directly OnDemand please click here.