If there’s one aspect of modern living where humans have consistently high expectations, it’s retail. With soaring demand and questions about supply-chain stability, how are retailers supposed to keep delivering over the peak season?

Below are some tangible things you can begin doing today to get your retail supply chain in fighting shape for the holiday season. Deloitte predicts a 4% to 6% rise in holiday-season spending in 2022, for a new total of $1.47 trillion spent between November and January. Here is how to ensure you get your rightful share of consumer dollars.

Help Customers Avoid Crowds at Retail Locations

A substantial number of consumers prefer home delivery when it comes to making purchases — and eCommerce sales volume may overtake retail sales in the coming years. Retailers can help customers get the best possible experience when they visit a brick-and-mortar establishment. Here are practical steps to take:

Eliminate checkout lines with buy-online, pickup-in-store options and curbside pickup.
Provide faster home-delivery options so customers don’t feel obligated to shop in-store.
Allow customers to return items purchased online or in-store and provide an expedited process for these reverse logistics.
Adopt contactless payment options to facilitate speedy checkouts.

This isn’t just for the benefit of your clientele — it’s also for your own sanity. Every effort to streamline the customer experience puts money back in your pocket.

Compare Inventory Against Past Peaks

It’s even more critical to ensure your inventory can keep up with demand during peak season. Expect customers to be even more impatient and ready to spend elsewhere if they can’t get what they need or are promised something’s in stock when it really isn’t.

Prepare your inventory for peak season as early as possible by analyzing past data to get an idea of what you can expect. For this, you need demand-planning software and you’re practically spoiled for choices in 2022. Any top picks will perform historical and predictive analysis that would take ages to complete by hand.

SKU stow locations are just one example of how demand planning can impact the retail supply chain and your peak-season strategy. Instead of duplicating your entire inventory across multiple warehouse locations, use observation or software assistance to spot trends. These trends will inform where you stow different inventory items to correspond to location-based demand and provide the most efficient order fulfillment.

Work to Diversify Your Supply Chain

Whether you’re mainly anticipating brick-and-mortar sales, online sales or a mix, you don’t want customers to come up empty-handed when they’re ready to spend. Not every variable is under your control — especially where suppliers are concerned. But you do have some options for hardening your retail supply chain against the unexpected.

There are significant benefits associated with diversifying your supplier partners. Above all, diversification grants you flexibility during demanding times, like peak-season holiday shopping rushes. One supplier may have the most competitive lead times, while another offers the best prices.

Diversification means you can make judgment calls to prioritize competitive pricing or guaranteed order fulfillment at peak demand. More options also protect you against unforeseen events, such as global pandemics, regional labor disputes and other disruptive influences.

Use Competitive Tactics to Lessen the Logistics Load

Many say the holiday shopping season officially begins in October now, with Prime Day moving from its previous placement in July. Major retailers have answered by moving their biggest promotions of the calendar year.

Why follow the pack? People will be glued to major retailers’ websites during peak shopping seasons. You also understand that if you wait until the most obvious shopping weeks to court all your peak-season shoppers, your warehouses and supply chain will scramble with the volume.

Instead, find competitive ways to stagger your peak-season promotions with those of your competitors — or pre-empt them with even earlier campaigns and sales. You’ll peel away some of the customers who would’ve swamped you during the holiday shopping rush, spread out the load on your warehouses and fleets across more of the year and capture customers before other retailers.

Is Your Retail Supply Chain Ready?

The peak season is make-or-break time for retail supply chains and it’s going to put yours to the test. The above suggestions are just a start, but they’ll help you get a jump on things and think strategically about how to be flexible, clever and competitive throughout the holiday-shopping frenzy.

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Nov 2022

How to Prepare Your Retail Supply Chain for Peak Season

By Megan Vitanza, Digital Content Consultant at WebFX

Megan Vitanza is a Digital Content Consultant for WebFX. She specializes in off-page SEO and conversion rate optimization and has over six years of experience working with clients in the supply chain and industrial sectors. She enjoys learning more about these subjects and sharing that knowledge with others. When Megan isn't writing new content and optimizing websites, you'll find her constructing a new Lego set, stargazing or rereading Harry Potter for the millionth time.

COVER STORY

Fiona Swerdlow

VP, Research Director

Holden Bale

Global Head of Commerce

Huge

Tom Niedbalski

VP - Gift Solutions

Melissa Tatoris

VP of Retail

Afshin Yazdian

President

Francois Chaubard

Founder & CEO

07/05/2024 16:45:37

Three Ways Retailers Can Counter Supply Chain Disruption and Inflation This Holiday Season

By Matthew Furneaux, Director of Location Intelligence, Loqate

Matthew Furneaux is a location technology veteran with over 20 years of experience in helping global businesses reach their customers globally. As director of location intelligence at Loqate, a GBG company, Furneaux is responsible for strategy and innovation. He is also a retail and eCommerce expert and while at Loqate, has worked with leading eCommerce brands including Nordstrom, Sephora, Kohl’s, Ralph Lauren and Michaels. Before joining GBG, Matthew cofounded Global Address (later acquired by Trillium Software) and helped to create a single platform model for a global location validation service.

As retailers adjust to continued supply chain disruption, shoppers have already begun making their gift lists. Add in the challenge of growing inflationary pressure on businesses and consumers alike and it’s clear that this holiday season is on track to give retailers the gift of uncertainty.

With the potential for decreased consumer spending, competition among retailers will be high this year. These three tips can help retailers meet customer expectations and hit revenue goals despite supply chain disruption and economic uncertainty this holiday season.

1. Evaluate site performance early

Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the first two weeks of December are the biggest shopping events of the year. Now is a good time for a thorough analysis of previously experienced outages and performance issues. It’s important to determine what caused the issues and resolve them in advance. eCommerce teams should work closely with IT teams to make improvements and add memory when needed.

2. Rethink the Timing of Promotions

Retailers can appeal to consumers with promotions that reward them for shopping early which, in turn, can help optimize inventory. Consumers also want transparency. Providing visibility into inventory and shipping windows can also help shoppers make smart decisions. While it may cause a retailer to lose one sale, it could also preserve customer loyalty. The cost of losing a single sale is far less than losing a customer for good because of an inability to fulfill and deliver an order on time.

3. Capture accurate addresses in real-time.

Just under half (47%) of businesses rate the accuracy of physical address data as “critical” for first-time delivery, yet 74% of businesses point to bad address data as the cause of up to a quarter of their deliveries failing. The same proportion of businesses agree that customers often don’t realize a mistyped address can cause a failed delivery. In these instances, address verification can provide a vital failsafe.

Whether it’s a lapse in concentration, the slip of a finger on a mobile device or a missed field, shoppers often unknowingly provide incomplete or inaccurate address information. This faulty data impacts delivery to the right address, leading to delays, customer frustration and costly redelivery fees. Eight percent of domestic first-time deliveries fail, costing retailers an average of $17.20 per order or $197,730 per year.

A real-time type-ahead address capture solution allows retailers to collect accurate customer addresses in online forms and checkouts. Not only is it the quickest and easiest way to capture address data, it’s also the friendliest solution for mobile commerce. With type-ahead address lookup, a customer can typically complete an address capture with as little as six or seven keystrokes.

Amid economic challenges and shifting consumer preferences, a data-driven strategy will be critical for responding to conditions in real time. While retailers can’t stop inflation, it’s possible to recession-proof our businesses by improving profitability and solving for operational inefficiencies.

While retailers can’t stop inflation, it’s possible to recession-proof our businesses by improving profitability and solving for operational inefficiencies. Embracing a data-driven strategy will be critical for responding to conditions in real time.

4. Offer consumers flexible fulfillment options

Today's consumers have fully embraced the omnichannel experience. Adopted from the "buy online, pick up in-store" (BOPIS) method, curbside pickup allows shoppers to access necessary items without leaving their cars. Initially designed to protect both customers and employees by limiting the amount of person-to-person contact, it also promotes convenience and accelerates buying interactions. However, this practice does not come without its challenges. Failure to organize customer data and validate orders can put a hitch in this otherwise seamless process.

With convenience at the forefront of customer needs, retailers must ensure they collect high-quality data across all points of sale.

With a proactive approach and data-driven strategy, retailers can adjust and adapt to economic forces, supply chain challenges and shifting consumer behaviors. Efforts by retailers to improve the shopping experience and fortify their supply chains today have the potential to increase customer loyalty and drive revenue in the months and years to come.

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NOV 2022

NOVember 2022

COVER STORY

Jochen Heck

VP Sales - Retail

Colleen Baum

Partner

Amy Vener

Marketing Director

Mike Webster

SVP and GM

Karl Haller

Partner

Jill Standish

Sr. Managing Director

07/05/2024 16:45:37

Finding savings on holiday gifts is no longer confined to Black Friday weekend. With ongoing concerns about historic levels of inflation, many consumers started their holiday shopping early. A Bankrate survey found that 50% of consumers started or planned to start by the end of October. With that in mind, retailers got into the game earlier than usual as well: Target launched “Deal Days” while Amazon extended its hugely popular Prime Day promotion with the “Prime Early Access Sale.”

While bigger, earlier sales are a boon for bottom lines, they also create more questions and issues for consumers. Having a well-prepared customer support team ready to take on the inevitable challenges must be a top priority. According to research from NewVoiceMedia, 66% of customers are more likely to be loyal to a business after a good customer experience (CX), while 65% are likely to recommend the company to friends and family. On the other hand, bad CX costs U.S. businesses $75 billion each year.

So, how can retailers ensure they are ready to provide a great CX to thrive in the new era of holiday shopping? Here are three tips to follow.

Empower CX Agents With Better Training and Tools

Having a defined employee training program is critical, especially when working with seasonal workers who need to get up to speed quickly. The most successful organizations take a holistic approach to train contact center agents to ensure they are prepared to handle all facets of customer interactions. According to a Talkdesk report, 92% of CX professionals see contact center agents as brand ambassadors – with the proper training, they can turn stressed, hostile customers into loyal brand advocates. They are as important as your store associates. Here are a few tips for training the CX team to exceed customer expectations

Educate new agents about the business. This is especially important when dealing with seasonal employees. They should have a comprehensive understanding of the organization, not just the product but the company’s mission, culture, and values. This is crucial for long-term relationship building, as the more agents understand their role and the business, the more effectively they can connect with customers. Organizations can also pair inexperienced agents with AI assistance tools that analyze language and provide guidance during customer interactions, allowing them to tap into valuable information as their onboarding and learning about products and the company.
Involve top performers in training. Training by example can be an extremely effective way to share knowledge. People often learn best by doing rather than watching. By shadowing top contact center agents, or listening to top scoring conversation recordings, new hires can hear how good calls happen and see in real-time how to use the tools at their disposal to succeed. Additionally, managers can embed speech-detecting AI into the onboarding phase to flag when certain phrases are used, automatically alerting a manager or peer to intervene and take over the call.
Train agents individually. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to training employees—factors such as experience, product complexity, and management style all impact learning. The most effective training happens one-to-one, with flexibility built to evolve to each person’s needs.

To best complement contact center workers during customer interactions, agent assist tools can help agents understand and execute the next best action. To continuously help new agents improve, quality management analytics tools can quickly generate aggregate data for managers to examine and identify patterns. This enables more personalized coaching at scale.

Customers aren’t going to notice what happens behind the scenes. What they will notice is an untrained CX agent, a lack of communication, or an inefficient process. Businesses must focus on addressing the priorities of the customer, or risk falling victim to the chaos of a holiday season unlike any other.

Prioritize transparency and proactive communication

If and when issues arise with products or services, such as shipping delays or stock shortages, staying on top of customer communication is key to mitigating frustration. Once customers express dissatisfaction, it’s already too late; they expect businesses to anticipate their needs. Therefore, companies should practice proactive outbound engagement to avoid jeopardizing customer loyalty and causing churn.

Proactive outbound engagement means nurturing relationships after purchase and evaluating each customer to provide the right service at the right time. Technology adoption is essential for successful proactive outbound engagement, as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can be used to predict customer needs and necessary actions based on past behaviors. Nine in 10 (87%) of respondents in Talkdesk’s Proactive Engagement Survey said proactive customer engagement is a driver of customer satisfaction.

Improve Internal Communication

The stakes are higher than ever this holiday season - retailers are battling inventory issues, labor shortages, and lower revenue due to inflation. Keeping customers satisfied and loyal requires a seamless experience where employees can work together to resolve issues effectively. Once again, AI-powered automation has a huge impact.

For example, interactive voice response (IVR) systems have evolved over the years from a pain point to a helpful assistant for human agents. Instead of a confusing phone menu, voice assistants can handle the bulk of communication using predictive analytics and provide important contextual information to an agent. This is a massive step toward improving first call resolution (FCR) rates; first call resolution is the top driver of customer loyalty, according to Talkdesk research. Technology can also help by integrating unified communication (UC) systems with the contact center, keeping everyone on the same page and breaking down the traditional barriers to communication between departments. Customers aren’t the only ones impacted when calls are transferred multiple times or the customer is on hold for 10 minutes; it also decreases employee productivity.

The bottom line is this: customer interactions must be quick, easy, and pleasant. Not every organization is going to use the same platform or follow the same sequence of training steps, and customers aren’t going to notice what happens behind the scenes. What they will notice is an untrained CX agent, a lack of communication, or an inefficient process. Businesses must focus on addressing the priorities of the customer, or risk falling victim to the chaos of a holiday season unlike any other.

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Nov 2022

The Earlier the…Crazier: Three Ways Retailers Can Prepare CX Teams to Manage the Longer Holiday Shopping Season

By Shannon Flanagan, VP of Global Strategy, Retail and Consumer Goods at Talkdesk

Shannon Flanagan is vice president of global strategy at Talkdesk. She has been retailing since college, both in-stores and as a buyer, merchant, consultant, sales leader, and strategist. She’s been an executive with Gap, Lands' End, and Macy's, defining and managing strategic initiatives, with expertise in omnichannel transformation. She has also worked with hyper-growth and Fortune 500 companies during her time with Accenture, Infor, and Slalom.