Superior Customer Experience, Only Possible Through Great Employee Experience

By Kelly Kent, Chief Transformation Officer, ServiceNow

Kelly Kent leads ServiceNow’s Chief Transformation Office. In her role, she and her team collaborate with companies on using the Now Platform to realize fast time to value, optimize for efficiency and growth, as well as deliver innovations and overall business agility. In addition, Kelly advises business stakeholders around a shared vision for digital transformation and enterprise simplification. Prior to joining ServiceNow, Kelly served as SVP, HRBP operations for Lowe’s, Inc., a transformation program management executive for Bank of America, and a division manager at UPS.

Consumer experiences have always mattered to retailers, and now they are shaping the needs and the desires of employees in the workplace. Just think of ordering food on your phone, researching a holiday gift, or setting up an appointment. A few clicks and you're done.

At work, people expect the same experience—access to tools and services that enable them to act immediately. When faced with a customer problem, employees can’t often connect the internal dots to understand who in the organization—inside or outside their function—can help them make the best decisions that affect a positive customer outcome.

The challenge of delivering a great customer experience doesn’t solely rest in agent training or the latest call center technology. It rests squarely in an organization’s ability to deliver a great employee experience. An experience that removes hurdles that occur at the moment of truth and gives employees what they need to address issues without navigating the org chart, consulting a cheat sheet, or waiting on hold for central support.

The challenge of delivering a great customer experience rests squarely in an organization’s ability to deliver a great employee experience.

Create a Great Employee Experience

Reimagining employee experience is about speed, agility, and responsiveness. The three main characteristics all retailers should consider when evaluating employee satisfaction are:

Simplicity - How easily can employees get work done? How many systems do they interact with to find information for customers or themselves? When they’ve requested help or information, how do they have assurance (and transparency!) that someone is actually working on their request? Is information presented in a way that tells the whole story of the situation?
Ecosystem - Does every employee understand how their work affects the work of their team, their coworkers, and the entire company? Can they tap into this ecosystem to satisfy a customer request, or fear they are a just link in a long chain of customer call transfers?
Rewarding Work - Employees look for work that is both personally rewarding and advances the goals of the company. Do employees feel they can represent the company’s commitment to satisfying every customer, or is the focus on the number of calls they complete in an hour?

In the retail industry, lack of clarity and context can be crushing for an employee standing in front of the customer when a credit card is declined, or delivery of a back-ordered product gets extended. Employees need access to the right tools at the right time to provide the services needed – like redirecting orders, checking stock at another location, or grabbing immediate answers during real-time customer service inquiries.

Provide One Place for Answers

Technology can create a customer-driven employee experience by breaking down silos and improving connections. Centralized access into disparate systems for tracking, monitoring, and managing customer requests from unified systems and data will be made possible by advancements like AI, machine learning, and analytics integrated at the platform level.

Giving employees a lens to see what’s happening across silos (both upstream and downstream) can improve their confidence to deliver a great experience. This trust grows if the information is constantly updated and distributed as needed.

For example, Swarovski saw a 55 percent reduction in service caseloads when they combined all customer communications from phone, email, and chat into a single case. Now that employees have better transparency from a single source, service advisors are more productive, and customer expectations are met faster.

Investing in the employee experience can have a noticeable impact on your customer experience. So next time an irate customer requests help virtually or in-store, your employees are empowered to take the next steps with all the information and resources needed available at their fingertips.

The State of the Retail Industry 2023

JAN 2023

07/05/2024 15:52:33

Effective First Party Data Strategy: Maximize Impact @ Minimal Spend

By Tom Burke

Founder & CEO, AtData

Every new year brings a variety of challenges and opportunities for retailers, and 2023 will be no exception. Not only are retailers challenged with supply chain issues, increases in interest rates, higher advertising costs and fast-changing consumer demands, but they also must contend with the deprecation of third-party cookies and restricted access to mobile advertising IDs. With all these factors combined, marketers are finding it increasingly difficult to reach their prospects and customers with the right message at the right time.

Businesses that make sure their customer data is accurate, complete, and connected will drive greater revenues, reduce risk and eliminate friction caused by siloed databases.

Tom Burke, Founder & CEO, AtData

With 25 years of experience creating data-based solutions, Tom thrives on finding new and better ways to clean and enhance email addresses. Prior to founding AtData, Tom was responsible for email hygiene products at Return Path and led the product team at Invertica. Tom started his career at Oracle, designing and implementing database applications for enterprise clients.

Many retailers will tighten their purse strings in the new year, and marketers will need to conserve their budgets. By developing a first-party data strategy, retailers can maximize the impact of their spend at the lowest cost. Businesses that make sure their customer data is accurate, complete, and connected will drive greater revenues, reduce risk and eliminate friction caused by siloed databases.

Below are some tips on how to enhance your first-party data to better engage with customers and prospects across all channels:

Cleanse Your Data

It takes a lot of marketing effort to entice a prospect to engage with your brand, and to stay connected. By implementing a data hygiene process at the point of collection, along with regular maintenance, you can ensure your past, current and incoming data will be valid and accurate. Bad email addresses can hurt your email deliverability, meaning fewer consumers will see your message, and mailing bad postal addresses has a material cost.

To get your data into shape, work with your database manager to understand how data is entering the system and through which channels. Together, you can create workflows to catch and correct data entry errors, stop fraudsters and update old data fields. By doing so, your inbox deliverability will improve, conversions will increase, and you will see a positive return on investment.

Complete Your Data

People respond to messages that are relevant to their needs and wants. Knowing the “who” behind an email address gives marketers insights into the consumer’s potential interests. Utilizing a single identifier, such as an email address, marketers can leverage identity graphs to help build complete customer profiles with demographics, behavioral data and other points of contact. By having a 360-degree view of the consumer, it becomes easier to create personalized and relevant outreach across multiple channels that will streamline the customer experience, deepen the customer relationship and improve lifetime value.

Connect Your Data

Consumers can have multiple email addresses which can all be used interchangeably across platforms and devices. As consumers interact with your brand via an in-store visit, website purchase or call center outreach, it’s important to keep all those touchpoints connected to one singular profile to keep the customer experience streamlined. By linking the data received from each platform, you gain insight into the origin of that customer and where they are in the buyer’s journey. It creates opportunity to cross-sell/up-sell and enables you to reach out on the channels that consumers use the most. This creates brand loyalty and keeps people coming back year-after-year.

As we gear up for another year, with increased economic and data challenges, you can achieve more at less cost by optimizing the data you already have in your database. By leveraging the power of the email address and using it to gather data to fuel and target your campaigns, you can ensure you’re connecting with buyers and exceeding their expectations all year long.

The State of the Retail Industry 2023

JAN 2023

07/05/2024 15:52:33

Driving Operational Efficiency in 2023

By Brian Brinkmann, Chief Product and Marketing Officer, Agilence

Brian Brinkmann, Chief Product and Marketing Officer, Agilence

Brian has nearly 25 years of analytics, technology, and enterprise software leadership. Brian is responsible for driving growth through product innovation and marketing excellence. Prior to Agilence, Brian led product management, marketing, and strategy as well as go-to-market (GTM) for Logi Analytics, helping the company more that double annual recurring revenue, and MicroStrategy, helping the company grow from under $100M to over $500M in revenue. Brian holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management and an MEM from the McCormick School of Engineering, both at Northwestern University, and a Bachelor’s of Electrical Engineering from the University of Dayton.

Advanced Analytics Unlocks Growth

Focus on Loss Prevention (LP) to Improve Margins

High inflation, labor challenges, and, of course, ever-changing customer buying preferences present retailers, already struggling with razor thin margins, even more challenges. The good news is that retailers already have what they need to improve profits: data. What they often lack are refined analytic solutions to improve operational efficiencies and make sense of increasing amounts of data from varying and ever-growing sources throughout the business.

More data has been heralded as the way to unlock greater insight into operational improvements, and more data is what companies are getting from self-checkout (SCO), serialized inventory (Electronic Product Codes linked to RFID tags), IoT sensors, video feeds, loyalty programs, and more.

However, more data does not necessarily mean better decisions. It usually means information overload, an inability to make sense of it all, and a desire to retreat to outdated decision-making heuristics. Analytics cuts through the noise to present useful information and prescriptive actions. Operators are not analysts; they are short on time and need to know what actions to take right now – not sift through mountains of cryptic reports.

Basic analytics that describe merely what happened (descriptive) and why (diagnostic) are not enough. Winning retailers need to know what is likely to happen (predictive) and what to do about it (prescriptive). In a recent report from IHL Group, they found that retailers using Prescriptive analytics across all business categories have an 81% higher sales growth expectation for 2023. This shift won’t happen all at once throughout the business, but in a process of progression in different operational areas. Two key areas include loss prevention and inventory.

The National Retail Federation estimates that shrink or preventable loss costs the industry nearly $94B annually. While Organized Retail Crime (ORC) often grabs the headlines, it’s expensive and difficult to deter and prevent. However, employee shrink, which accounts for more than 0.50% of sales, is much easier to control and correct with analytics – margin improvement that goes directly to profits. Loss prevention analytics deliver actionable information for often-overwhelmed retail professionals to help them react more quickly. Stores using prescriptive analytics achieved 5.3% higher profit growth in 2022 and are expecting 34% higher sales growth at the store level than competitors using only descriptive or diagnostic analytics.

Winning retailers need to know using Prescriptive analytics across all business categories, in different operational areas will yield rich dividends in the long run.

Predictive Analytics for Inventory

Satisfying the customer experience is paramount and the way to do that is by understanding inventory to have the products people want. According to an IHL Group report in August, the overall cost of inventory distortion – sales lost due to retailers not having what the consumer wants to buy when they want to buy it – reached $1.993 trillion in 2023. Nearly $1 trillion of this was due to controllable issues from retailers such as buying and planning issues, internal process issues, internal data, and system problems. Predictive analytics allow for automated anomaly recognition and the assignment of prioritized tasks to the right team members to minimize inventory distortion and keep products in stock.

It is time retailers turn loss prevention into profitability. They need to empower their loss prevention and asset protection teams with the right tools to look beyond traditional theft and fraud to tackle preventable loss in all its forms – in the store and online.

The State of the Retail Industry 2023

JAN 2023

07/05/2024 15:52:33