Telecom & Technology Consulting
Not so long ago, a retailer’s brand perception was based solely on the quality of their products. But the criteria for how one views a retailer is no longer so simple. Today, from the consumer perspective, it’s all about the experience.
People want a quick and intuitive way to browse and buy. They want to automatically be served complementary options. They want hassle-free options for interacting with customer support. All of these demands make up the customer experience. Retail leaders understand the challenge. And increasingly, innovative IT executives are adopting cloud platforms that support the complete customer experience.
But embracing the cloud goes beyond being a mere technological shift. The customer experience is now the business itself. That’s why the cloud is essential to every customer interaction. In fact, today, a unified cloud platform is indispensable.
Retailers must make customer experience priority number one to remain competitive. This means making investments driven by organizational goals such as revenue growth, product adoption, cost reduction, risk mitigation, and marketing differentiation. Organizations can do so with the adoption of a complete cloud platform that enables them to seamlessly manage diverse interactions.
As clear as those benefits may seem to many of us, the idea doesn’t always match the reality. In a Customer Contact Week Digital study, nearly 60% of the respondents said that customer service had become less satisfactory between 2022-2023. That’s not necessarily a statistic that retailers can feel good about.
The cloud can reverse that trend. With the cloud, retailers can manage multiple customer interactions from multiple touchpoints. Specifically, the cloud unifies data from sources such as social media, phone calls, and website interactions. As a result, you enable a consistent and seamless customer journey, which ultimately provides a positive experience and lays the groundwork for repeat business.
To improve the experience even more, IT leaders can include advanced features like personalization and proactive notifications. With unified data and artificial intelligence (AI), the quality of interactions improves exponentially, improving the odds of long-term customer loyalty.
Despite all the seemingly obvious advantages we mentioned, it’s not always easy to adopt the complete customer experience cloud. To reach their goal, retailers must eliminate silos within the organization. That can be challenging, of course, as many corporations often blindly do business “the way they’ve always done it”, and perceive major change as a threat. Leaders must recognize, however, that simplifying the management of various applications via the cloud is actually an opportunity for increased efficiency and growth. People can work smarter, not harder, all while reaping more fruit for their labor.
Retailers can simplify operations even more by streamlining the legacy tech stack. Also, simplifying application management will eliminate the chaos of having multiple technologies managed by various teams and vendors. All of this leads to a unified platform, which allows the organization to have a consistent customer experience across the omnichannel. That’s what retailers should focus on the most. It shouldn’t matter how you make customers happy; the means justifies the ends. And if the cloud is the best way to enhance every customer interaction, so be it.
