This article is provided by BRC Associate Member and Partner, Medallia
The voice of the retail customer is loud and clear: If you haven’t already, it’s time to adapt to meet the needs of the new customer experience.
The pandemic brought with it a new playbook for winning retail customers. Offerings, such as curbside pickup and new operational initiatives like training employees on health and safety protocols, emerged to give retailers concrete ways to remain in the game and delight customers. But what does it mean to execute on those recommendations flawlessly and at scale? Your customers are actually telling you. Are you listening?
To answer this question with confidence, Medallia’s Strategy and Analytics Team (MSAT) analyzed millions of retail customer verbatims, identified the top 100 words and phrases and synthesized the results into three key themes. We also compared results for the 2020 and 2019 holiday season to identify the magnitude of how the conversation shifted to help retailers know where to invest and innovate going forward.
Three themes — ease, availability and service — dominated the conversation between customers and retailers in 2020, building strong momentum throughout the year and signaling the need to accelerate toward fast, frictionless digital-oriented solutions.
To further contextualize their findings, the MSAT team looked back at Holiday 2019 to see how the conversation compared. Interestingly, while service remained an important part of the discussion, customers were far more likely to share feedback around ease and availability in 2020 compared to 2019.
The changing consumer behaviors we observed during the pandemic are here to stay. Read on for tips on how retailers, on both the operations and customer experience side, can leverage insights from this research.
Ease: It’s more than just convenience
Customers defined “ease” in the context of low effort and frictionless experiences, most often in referencing digital or omnichannel interactions. Interesting too was the change in mentions of two words often carrying a very similar meaning (ease and convenience). Ease surpassed convenience at the onset of the pandemic and remained ahead for the rest of the year.
Here are three ways retailers can leverage these insights:
#1 Design simple 1-2-3 paths to purchase
For operational leaders, simplify journeys to ensure customers — particularly those new to your brand or new ways of shopping — will find what they are looking for in the least amount of clicks, filters or conversations. For customer experience leaders, combine targeted pulse feedback with observed behaviors to identify and address patterns of friction during, if not immediately following, the experience. Perform tests to see which adjustments have the largest impact on experience and conversion.
#2 Orient and onboard to new experiences
For operational leaders, bring customers along to the evolved ways of engaging with your brand by communicating in real time/in the moment to guide them on new elements of the shopping journey, anticipating their needs and questions in advance (e.g. “What comes next with your curbside return?” text message).
For customer experience leaders, take a pulse of customers on their opinion of the “effort” or “ease” of interacting with your brand. Leverage alerts to save those customers expressing frustration or confusion in real time.
#3 Offer tailored and flexible alternatives
For operational leaders, remove friction by offering creative and flexible solutions for key moments of truth: payment alternatives (e.g. contactless payment, installments), fulfillment options (e.g. curbside, same day delivery) and simple return and exchange processes (cross-channel returns, Return Bar partnerships).
For customer experience leaders, use feedback to evaluate which offerings yield the highest impact in terms of experience and ROI. Prioritize solutions to evolve and scale.
Availability: Choice is king
Confronted with stock outages and waitlists like never before, customers commented on frustrations with availability far and beyond previous holiday seasons. They highlighted the importance of being able to easily find what they were looking for — in the moment they wanted it — by leveraging choices and alternatives to help complete their mission even if their first desired path was not accessible to them.
Service: Fast and frictionless
While the conversation around service didn’t experience the same surge in volume as ease and availability, it did surface an interesting insight: Service is associated more and more with fast and frictionless interactions with a brand. While historically one of the more common characteristics of service oriented discussions, it now extends beyond interactions with employees.
Driving your business forward
Customers are speaking directly to retailers. They’re saying, “Make it easy for me to engage with you, find what I’m looking for when and where I need it. And when issues arrive, put speed and efficiency at the center of your resolution process.”
Ask yourself two questions: 1) How does your brand measure up against that statement? and 2) How are you activating customer feedback to drive change and improvement toward that goal?
By Erica James, Roshni Goel and Maddie Clark