IQPC CX Research Report for Retailers: Top Takeaways

Our executive-level insights from our most in-depth report yet.

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At Kustomer, we love retail and direct-to-consumer brands. These brands are becoming more and more obsessed with their customers — because they need to be to differentiate themselves in today’s competitive era of retail. For them, experience is everything: product, sales, service, branding, and more.

Our most recent and intensive research report, authored in partnership with Customer Contact Week Digital (a division of IQPC), takes an in-depth look into the state of customer experience for retail businesses. What we found was enlightening.

If you’re at a retail brand, definitely pay attention, because one thing became very clear:

CX IS THE MAIN DIFFERENTIATOR FOR RETAIL

That’s right. Not branding, not marketing, not pricing.

The research shows that you must avoid the major retail trap and focus on the entire customer lifetime journey — not just the Point of Purchase. Retailers need to optimize their interactions, but stay focused on increasing lifetime value with simple, personal experiences. And despite their commitment, most retailers aren’t capable of delivering these experiences. The report found that:

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

• The #1 priority of most retailers is to reduce the effort customers need to spend in their customer experience. The #2 priority is automation.
• The #1 frustration for agents is disconnected systems.
• 80% of retailers say that their customers struggle to move between touchpoints without having to repeat information.

And in the report, we dive deep into the opportunities for retailers and how they’re capitalizing on them to improve their experience and drive business growth:

• Reducing Effort: Only 48% of businesses are making any attempt to measure effort. However by putting all their information in a single timeline, ParkWhiz was able to matchmake users and parking spaces, and found a 2–3% increase in retention with customers who have interacted with the CX team — and increased average Time to First Response by more than 10%.

• Personalization: Only 46% of businesses are actively attempting to assess the personalization of their experiences. Yet Glossier is able to see all their customer and order information in one place, which makes it easy to deliver highly personalized, 1–1 interactions.

• Automation: 79% of retailers believe bots are important, and 60% plan to maintain or increase their investments in automation. By making the customer their atomic unit of understanding, Slice was able to manage customer interactions across teams and manage thousands of touches daily, seeing a 20–30% decrease in handle times.

Investing in these goals yields real results.

Delivering a solid and memorable experience is difficult and getting harder, but Kustomer is here to help. The full customer picture provides teams with the right intelligence to better optimize business service processes with automation, prioritize team member time, and scale your service operations as the business grows, driving increased customer lifetime value.

The retailers that invest in their customer experience and get this complete customer view are going to be able to differentiate themselves and remain relevant. Read our full report, and make this the year you deliver the best customer experience yet.

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About Kustomer

Kustomer is the first CRM for customer experience that focuses on customers, not tickets, enabling companies to know everything about every customer. Used by Outdoor Voices, Slice, SmugMug, and more, Kustomer provides businesses with a full view of every customer’s lifetime. Kustomer unifies all relevant data, customer history, apps, and systems, enabling informed service actions. Kustomer was founded in 2015 with headquarters in New York City.