The New Normal for Retail and CPG: How does the approach to Customer Experience change in a post covid-19 world?

Customer experience underscores the importance of the overall experience of a customer interacting with your brand, buying from you, and what they feel and internalize at every touch-point. Customer experience is one of the primary differentiating factors when it comes to contrasting your and your competitors’ offerings.

However, in the world where social distancing is changing customer habits and priorities, what does effective customer experience even mean? Since brick-and-mortar stores have shuttered in response to COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for online retail services has skyrocketed.

According to Adobe Analytics, daily e-commerce sales increased 25 percent in the US in the first three weeks of March 2020. Concerned shoppers gave in to panic buying and started hoarding medicine, groceries, household goods, and cleaning supplies.

Customer behavior is altering in the following ways:

• Buyers are now more aware of the quality of eatables and are ready to shell out extra to get better quality groceries and food products.
• Retail customers are also part of the traumatized societies, going through anxiety and the emotional impact of the pandemic.
• Customer trust is at a risky juncture as 71% say if they perceive a brand putting profit over people, they will lose trust in the brand forever.
• Online shopping is now the new normal.
• Customers plan on being cautious with their spending even when the pandemic is over, not shopping for anything besides necessities.

As customer behavior and sentiment shifts, retailers & CPG brands need to keep up.

As a consequence of the seismic shift in the volume and nature of orders, customer contact centers started experiencing a high volume of calls about ordering and availability. At the same time, the agents responsible for delivering exceptional customer experience are themselves navigating work-from-home, social distancing, and hygiene, just like their customers.

Now more than ever, retail businesses need to focus on gaining and retaining customers, all the while helping to alleviate stress for their customer service representatives. Now is the time for these companies to seal in the loyalty of their customers.

Here’s how you can leverage AI and Automation to grow your revenues and service your customers much better:

1. Enable Digital Sales – Boost your digital sales by over 25% with personalized AI powered conversations & product recommendations over voice, social media chat and emails. AI based contact center to place automated calls and capture orders directly over voice. Straight-through processing of Purchase Orders into your ERP systems and real time notifications for customers.
2. Adopt Conversational Marketing to Personalize buying experience. Build & launch engaging AI powered marketing campaigns which use rich natural language like conversations across voice, emails, SMS and Social Media. Engage & acquire high quality customers & boost your RoI on marketing by 80%.
3. Adopt AI based Contact Center solutions –Reduce Customer Support costs by over 70% with the help of AI based Contact Center. Address customer issues in real time providing best resolutions with an option for live agent transfer if needed. Turn customers into brand advocates by turning their feedback into valuable insights.

supervity.ai CX Ninja engages your customers over calls, emails & chat to improve lead conversion, increase digital sales and deliver exceptional service. Essentially, it helps enhance your Customer Experience using artificial intelligence through-out their journey across various touch-points.

• Increase digital sales with outbound voice calls, WhatsApp and Social media engagement.
• Straight through Order processing & Faster collections; timely notifications for outstanding payments.
• Qualify & capture more leads 24×7 on your website and social media with engaging conversations.
• Improve conversion with improved buying experience through contextual product discovery.
• Reduce Average Handling Time & customer support costs by routing repetitive queries to AI.

If your retail business manages an omni-channel strategy, E-Workers can join hands with human agents to focus on delivering customer support on channels like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc. This will help you ensure you stay available to your customers across the board.

In the age of COVID-19, your brand can choose to stand out by being empathetic and understanding. With the help of the right tools and technologies, scale human interaction to offer unmatched customer experience and set your business up for success in a post-coronavirus world.

Curios to learn how a large brand managed to improve Turn Around Time from 24 hrs earlier to under 4 minutes and boost customer NPS by over 30%? Download the case study here.