Top 5 Themes From The Kustomer Experience Exchange
Looking Into 2018 and The Future of Retail.
Last month we hosted our first ever Kustomer Experience Exchange at Silicon Valley Bank in New York. With over 60 brands in attendance ranging from subscription, fashion, retail, to beauty, marketplace, and more, we brought together top executives and customer experience leaders to discuss how they are innovating and reinventing customer experience in the digital age. Speakers at the event included customer experience executives at Glossier, MakeSpace, Tough Mudder, Clarity Money, Aircall, StellaService and more. Here’s what we learned.
Your company should revolve around your customer.
Successful companies aren’t just built around products. In order to stay competitive, be successful, and have a unique value proposition, companies have one critical thing that they have to focus on — the customer. That was a phrase we heard from every speaker. It’s true — 84% of retailers believe that customer experience is a significant differentiator in their sector. Strong customer experience also has an impact on brand, with 73% of consumers saying friendly customer service representatives can make them fall in love with a brand. Curating a unique brand that customers can connect with and then delivering amazing customer experience and service that reflects your messaging, culture, and values, is one of the only ways to be competitive with giants like Amazon and Walmart.
Another way to strengthen your brand and stay authentic while offering great customer experience and service is by focusing on your internal teams. Staying true to your company’s values as you scale and grow, focusing on operational processes, and ensuring everyone is well trained all play a role in delivering an on-brand, authentic customer experience. It starts from the point of hire — as one of our panelists, a VP of Operations noted, “you have to hire people who are passionate about helping people and fixing problems.” Many attendees chimed in agreeing that it’s important to hire the right people, with a great team fit being actors and actresses who have a tendency to provide superior service. Some companies go beyond the service team and practice whole company support. Our keynote speaker stated that at his previous company they had every employee go through customer service training and work in the role for one day. This practice helps employees understand the customer and be customer-centric no matter what their role is.
Amazing customer experience and service ensures repeat business and loyalty.
Repeat business and customer loyalty are increasingly important factors of profitability. A five percent increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%. Delivering great customer experience and service that’s tied into your brand is the best way to ensure your customer’s loyalty, especially when it can cost 5 times more to acquire new customers than it does to keep current ones. Attendees and speakers commented repeatedly that providing a great experience at the acquisition and post-purchase phases are important to them as they scale their service teams.
Another aspect of the cost of losing repeat business is knowing and acting on when customers have a bad experience. Only 1 out of 26 customers complain when they have a bad experience, but 67% of customers churn because of that bad experience. So how can companies proactively identify when customers have a bad experience, without them reaching out? For example, if a company had an issue where a few customers complained about quality inconsistency in an item, their customer service team could search for all orders that were fulfilled using that particular lot number, identifying all customers who received the defect item, and proactively reach out to replace the order before the rest of the customers complained. Proactive customer service is a tool that many of speakers indicated was critical to delivering a great customer experience, and integral to ensuring repeat business and loyalty.
Omnichannel isn’t a myth and can be done correctly with the right tools.
Another common discussion across our panels and speakers was the difference between multi-channel and omnichannel. Many customer service tools market themselves as omnichannel solutions, but in reality offer multi-channel support. When 65% of customers are frustrated by inconsistent experiences across channels, multi-channel solutions don’t cut it. Our speakers stressed the importance of offering true omnichannel service, with consistent experiences across channels delivered by the same support agent. Enabling customers to experience a seamless transition between channels can increase your customer retention, since 32% switch because they are fed up with speaking to multiple agents. As Brad Birnbaum, our CEO & Co-founder declared, “the last thing a frustrated customer wants is to be asked to repeat information when changing support channels.” Empowering your team to deliver a consistent, seamless experience across channels can be done with the right technology that allows them to answer questions within the same conversation regardless of channel.
The next phase of retail is providing customers a seamless experience whether it’s in-store or online.
Retail isn’t dead, it’s evolving. This statement was repeated by multiple panelists, who emphasized that the next stage of retail is in offering a seamless experience across online, offline, and in-store interactions. You have to treat your customers the same way, whether they buy in store or online — BORIS and BOPIS as they are known today. For example, if your customer buys online and then returns in store, they need to experience the same brand and level of service across both portions of their journey. Your company needs to aggregate all your customer information, so that you know everything about your customer whether you are interacting with them digitally or in person. One of our audience members from a major fashion company affirmed that incorporating feedback you receive from your customers in store into the online experience is critical to their ability to maintain a consistent brand and position as an innovative retailer.
We’ve moved past the phase where companies only cater to the in-store or digital experience and on to a merging of the two. Pop-ups are now common occurrences, with Ecommerce companies like Outdoor Voices and Glossier using them to cater to fact that customers still want to interact directly with products — they want to try on items, view jewelry in person, test fragrances, and more. Throughout the entire evolution as retail and digital merge, customer data and knowledge continues to be an important factor in providing a seamless experience.
To stay competitive, eCommerce companies must take a data-based approach to customer experience.
The Walmart and Amazon phenomena pushes us to all be focused on unique customer experiences and the proposition of our brand and perception, which isn’t possible without a data-based approach. Ecommerce companies go out of business because they don’t focus on who the customer is, what they want, and what they’ve done. Knowing everything about your customer — whether it’s historical interactions, behavior, or communication style, has to be at the forefront in order to succeed in today’s competitive world.
Customer service teams collect a multitude of data when they interact with customers. Those data points can then be used to gain deeper insights into customer behavior, which is then communicated to other departments. Most of our speakers emphasized the importance of automating the cycle of feedback and incorporating data into business decisions. When product teams are notified of a potential recurring issue like products being damaged at the last mile, or an assembly line issue, or a local distribution issue, those data points — which often originates at the point of interaction with customer service — can have a big impact on the business as a whole. And those deeper data-based insights can lead to big changes such as not holding on too long to what has worked for one customer segment if it doesn’t work for the rest of the U.S., as our keynote speaker noted. Automating feedback, notifications, and deeper insights throughout the business is key to a company’s ability to stay competitive, and it’s what executives care about.
We learned a lot from our speakers and attendees of our Kustomer Experience Exchange. We hope you did as well, and can’t wait to see you at our next event. Watch our video below to get a glimpse of the Kustomer Experience Exchange.
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.
