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Consumers want a seamless retail experience before and after Christmas
Archived article dated Wednesday January 9th 2008
Like their US counterparts, many UK retailers will be banking on online sales to rescue a difficult festive season this year, with credit card firms predicting a 50 per cent rise in online revenues compared to 2006.
However, retailers need to do more than just build a killer website to keep consumers spending. They must find ways to improve the entire consumer buying experience - not just through the Web, but across all channels in which customers interact with the brand.
While the surge in orders before Christmas poses enormous logistical challenges for the fulfillment of online sales, the multi-channel returns and exchange challenge after Christmas is now just as complex. Although customers are increasingly shopping online, they may pick-up, return or exchange a gift through an entirely different channel than where they bought it. It is therefore vital that retailers provide a consistent and seamless cross-channel experience that meets the expectations of today's increasingly demanding, sophisticated and fickle consumer.
Indeed, consumers buy from a brand rather than a channel and expect a level of integration between store, online and call centre that doesn't necessarily exist. In a recent survey that we conducted across 5,000 consumers, 65 per cent expected to be able to cancel or modify an order via a store, the store's Web site or a call centre regardless of which channel was used to initially place the order. While this represents a major challenge for many retailers, it also presents an excellent opportunity to differentiate from the competition and strengthen the brand.
Cross channel: upping the ante for in-store
Interestingly, the research also demonstrated that online shopping experiences are affecting in-store expectations. Used to being able to research products online (in fact, nearly half of consumers feel that they can obtain better product information online), shoppers are increasingly looking for additional ways to further research products while shopping on the high street. Rather than speak to sales personnel, 41 per cent of shoppers feel it is important to be able to research product prices online while in a store.
In terms of product information it is also vital that consumers receive the same stock information in-store as they do online. Only 21 per cent of shoppers will check another store within the same retailer chain for an item if it is out of stock at one location. Nearly half will look for the item at a competitor's store, 13 per cent will order it online instead and about 20 per cent will give up altogether.
An opportunity to gain loyalty
For those that understand modern-day customer expectations and deliver a seamless multi-channel experience, there are multiple opportunities to gain customer loyalty through delivering excellent customer-service.
Providing availability information across channels will help increase customer satisfaction: currently, forty-three per cent of consumers find that sales associates are not able to check availability at the store or at other store locations, and 38 per cent of consumers state that sales associates cannot determine whether a given product is in stock. Improving stock visibility will enable stores to please the customer and save a sale that would otherwise have been lost.
More than half of consumers feel that if a retailer is out of an item, the retailer should locate the out-of-stock item at another location and ship it to the customer for free. Again, effectively integrating the supply chain will enable retailers to meet and exceed customer expectations.
Today's consumers are well-informed,technology-savvy, short on time and increasingly demanding. They also have more products available to them and a wider choice of ways of buying these products than ever before. As emerging and alternative shopping channels become mainstream, consumers will become even more exacting in their preferences and expectations.
Christmas provides retailers with not only end of year sales boosts but also an opportunity to demonstrate their commitment to customer service for the year ahead. However, consumers that find that their needs are not met in one retailer, or even in one particular channel of that retailer, will have no reservations about shopping elsewhere. Retailers that offer products through multiple channels must deliver a fully integrated shopping experience or they will find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
More findings from the survey, conducted for Sterling Commerce, can be found by following the link below.
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