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5 Tips to Prepare for the Holidays

When you prepare your retail business for the holidays, it’s important to find new ways to reach and interact with consumers. Shoppers expect to find what they’re looking for quickly and at an affordable price. A personalized experience can go a long way toward helping someone find the perfect holiday gift for their loved one. These five tips will provide this personalized experience and ensure consumers feel comfortable while shopping.

1. Prioritize Mobile

Using mobile devices to communicate, conduct business, and shop online has become mainstream for the general public across the U.S. That’s why developing a mobile-friendly shopping experience is an essential part of today’s retail engagement strategies.

Shopping sites and applications look different on mobile devices than they do on PCs. It’s important to optimize visuals, text, and interactive components so mobile shoppers can access information easily.

2. Support Multichannel Experiences

Retailers can provide a more holistic experience by using multiple channels to reach potential buyers. Multichannel experiences can make communication between the consumer and the representative more convenient and efficient.

For example, retailers have the power to use apps, SMS messaging, and even live chat to connect with consumers on different types of media.

3. Have Personalized Shopping Experiences

Buyers love it when shopping experiences are tailored to their needs. Personalizing solutions is a great way for retailers to show consumers that they care about them and their interests.

Today, retailers often use the power of data and one-on-one engagement to personalize the customer experience. Real-time messaging and analytics can also help representatives create a more individualized approach.

4. Prepare Customer Service Agents

Customer service agents need to be prepared for the demands of digital sales and engagement. Retailers need agents who can keep shoppers informed and provide useful updates.

Friendly and knowledgeable service agents inspire trust, and they can help build loyalty over time. Consumers who have had positive interactions with a representative are often more likely to return in the future.

5. Use Chatbots

Instead of assigning a customer service agent to answer every question or provide every service, you can prepare your retail business for the holidays by integrating the use of chatbots.

Chatbot technology is highly advanced, capable of finding solutions and answering simple questions for engaged consumers. It also helps potential buyers get answers faster, which saves time in the long run. Quiq’s Conversational Engagement Platform allows you to integrate both AI and human interaction for the optimal customer experience.

As consumers continue to spend more time at home, maintaining an effective online customer service presence is becoming more necessary than ever for businesses. Today’s customers have a lot of questions and expect a fast, first-class experience and personalized answers. Agents who aren’t using modern digital channels like SMS/text, web chat, and social direct messaging or leveraging the power of chatbots will struggle to keep up with multiple requests.

It’s not by chance that smart communication technology exists that can improve your customer service and provide greater convenience for your company and your customers. This list highlights the top customer experience trends for 2020 and how businesses are modernizing and improving customer service.

1. Offload Expensive Phone Calls to Messaging

It takes significant time and resources for a human agent to answer calls. As talented as humans are at multitasking, it’s impossible to juggle multiple, simultaneous phone calls. By offering options for text and live chat on your website, your business gives a caller the option to switch to a digital channel and engage with an agent immediately instead of waiting on hold.

Both messaging channels allow customers to respond to the message at their convenience. The end result is a more seamless experience for the customer when their needs aren’t put on hold.

2. Utilize Chatbots

Chatbots are automated programs that deliver information in a conversational way, like a human agent. Unlike a human agent, chatbots can handle countless requests simultaneously with almost instantaneous response times.

Chatbots can step in for agents experiencing over-crowded queues and quickly resolve basic requests — like scheduling appointments, collecting feedback, troubleshooting an issue, or answering the age-old question: “What is my order status?” But don’t think chatbots are simply used in place of human agents. Think of it as chatbots alongside human agents.

It’s true, chatbots, in many cases, can resolve customer inquiries without the intervention of a human agent but chatbots can be introduced at any point in the conversation to augment the work done by humans. For example, a chatbot could greet customers and collect important information prior to handing the conversation over to a human agent.

In another scenario, the human agent could transfer a conversation to a bot to collect information in the middle or end of a conversation. Once the bot has completed collecting information, the conversation is transferred back to the human agent. Bots can quickly handle the routine and repetitive tasks, like collecting order information, freeing up human sales, and service resources to focus on the more high-value tasks.

3. Transform Messages to the Richest Format

The easiest way to modernize your customer service to keep up with customer expectations is to send messages that match the sophisticated digital experiences they’re familiar with (think emojis, videos, photos, and memes). With rich communication services, businesses are able to send rich messages (cards, carousels, suggested replies) that exemplify the brand across all of the supported channels in the more modern ways customers are already using today, with their family and friends.

4. Adopt Mobile Messaging & On-Demand Service

The majority of Americans own a smartphone and carry around the capabilities to research, shop, and purchase products wherever they go. Optimize your website for mobile viewing so the answers customers want are just a tap away. With mobile messaging and on-demand, real-time service, contact with a representative from your company is immediate through text rather than dialing a number.

5. Implement Live Web Chat

Live chat is already a popular alternative to traditional calls, evidenced by expanding presence in business plans and rising satisfaction rates among customers who use it. In the same way your website is live 24/7, your customers expect agents to always be available. On-demand agents solve the challenge of your business’s schedule having to align with your customer’s. For organizations that do not have agents around the world in different time zones, a reliable chatbot offers around-the-clock messaging.

Use Quiq to Improve Customer Experience

Creating informative and adaptive communication is simple with Quiq messaging services. To learn more, contact us or schedule a live demo today.

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