This article is provided by BRC Associate Member, IP Integration.
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The golden quarter is not just an opportunity to drive sales. There’s a wealth of customer data waiting to be unlocked
These are challenging times for UK retailers. Persistently high interest rates and, until recently, inflation, have forced consumers to cut back on spending whilst creating tough macroeconomic headwinds for business finances. Sales fell 3.2% month-on-month in December 2023 in what is usually one of the busiest times of the year.
Against this backdrop, retailers should be looking for every opportunity to boost sales, by getting to know their customers better. And there’s no better way to do this than focusing on the Contact Centre, which sits on the front line of the battle to enhance customer experience. The upcoming golden quarter is a perfect chance to do so, enabling retailers to collect 12 months’ worth of customer data in just a few weeks. The more challenging part is knowing what to do with it.
A golden opportunity
After a period of pandemic-era uncertainty, British shoppers were plunged into a cost-of-living crisis that still affects many to this day. The impact was particularly noticeable in December last year, when the sector experienced the biggest drop in monthly sales since stores were forced to close during the pandemic in 2021. Even online retail sales slumped by roughly 2% in the month. The volume of overall sales in 2023 hit the lowest level since 2018, the same report notes.
Retailers will be hoping for better performance in this year’s “golden quarter”. But success is not just dependent on the state of the macroeconomy. Businesses that want to get proactive about driving sustainable growth must look to the period not simply as a way to drive sales, but also as an opportunity to enhance their understanding of customers. The sheer volume of data available to them during the period makes this an increasingly compelling argument. Footfall across UK retail locations rose by 6% from November to December 2023.
It all starts with data
As a primary customer service hub, the Contact Centre is where retailers should focus these efforts. A treasure trove of data is waiting to be unlocked, promising critical information on what customers want, what they need, and how best to deliver it to them.
Are there gaps in the customer journey? Are you using the right channels? Are some channels more popular than others? Is there demand for more? Does the customer experience online tally with that in store? Were there peaks and troughs in demand, and could you scale quickly enough to meet these? These are the vital questions that retailers need to be asking in this period.
Analysing historic data can help retailers forecast demand more accurately, to ensure they have the right amount of stock, whilst also surfacing insight to create more personalised and enjoyable shopping experiences. Analysing customer conversations can also provide invaluable insight into brand, products, processes, and services. This is where speech and text analytics come in, trawling through huge volumes of call recordings, emails and more to spot key phrases, search for anomalies and identify top-performing agents. The challenge is that for many retailers, such data resides in silos across the business. It must be unlocked and made available to the right agents at the right time to provide a 360-degree view of each customer.
Automating the process would be more efficient, enabling Contact Centres to monitor 100% of interactions rather than the 3-4% that is the norm. Large Language Models (LLM’s) can process complex, non-linear sentence structures to determine intent, topic, outcomes, next steps and much more – potentially offering a 10% uplift in customer satisfaction scores. And by using such tools, Contact Centres can also improve the agent experience by freeing up more talent to work on high value tasks such as answering complex queries.
Happy agents mean happy customers
The latter is particularly important in light of hiring challenges facing retail Contact Centres, which have a relatively high turnover of around 22% (as of 2022), even as agent positions are forecast to decline by 1.5% between 2022 and 2026.
Automated and AI-powered tools like self-service web chat functions and identification & verification (ID&V) can help in two ways here. They free up more agents and enhance productivity, as well as improving the working experience in a way that will help to reduce churn and therefore training costs. AI-driven Agent Assist technologies and knowledge management systems provide agents with up-to-date information in real-time, to accelerate call handling, resolve queries, improve security and simplify workflows.
A related piece of the puzzle is training and workforce management; an often under-valued but vitally important part of running a successful customer-centric retail business. Speech-to-text analytics can help to gather insights on employee performance while gamification technologies can boost agent motivation. Intelligent resource planning tools will help to forecast demand and support flexible working for improved work-life balance. Happy agents are more likely to lead to happier customers.
Unlocking data for added value
Some 90 percent of customers claim that that the experience a brand provides is as important as its products or services. In an age when customer loyalty is hard won but easily lost, retailers need to extract as much actionable insight from the data they collect as possible – to enhance the agent and customer experience. A strategic refresh of the Contact Centre could be a springboard to growth. It’s time to use the golden quarter to make the business case for change.