Driven by growing multichannel interactions with their customers, many businesses are moving away from call centres in favour of social media and virtual help centres to deal with customer complaints and queries.
The thought is that customers engaging with lower cost channels should be supported through siloed touch points and diverted away from higher cost call centres.
However, the power of the call centre shouldn’t be understated.
It is easy to have grand ideas about how incredible the customer experience could be.
These ideas can be quickly brought to ground by legacy IT issues that plague so many enterprises.
A few weeks ago I attended my first Digital Cream London event, sitting in on a rountable about joining up data across online and offline channels.
The three sessions with over 30 digital marketing professionals unveiled some interesting insights that I think are worth sharing.
This roundtable was, in my opinion, one of the more relevant ones as the customer journey becomes increasingly complex.
Detailed findings are included in our free-to-access trends briefing, sponsored by BlueKai, but in this post I’m going to focus on predictions for the next six months that were provided by the delegates.
Harvey Nichols has launched a new website that seeks to reinforce its status as a luxury multichannel retailer.
The relaunch includes a new mobile site and additional features such as a ‘Click & Try’ service and real-time stock levels.
Rather than carry out a full review of the new Harvey Nichols site, I thought it would be useful to highlight a few of the new features.
In the past we’ve come across a number of high-end brands that are severely let down by the online customer experience, so have Harvey Nichols and development agency Ampersand Commerce managed to get it right?
Read onto find out, or for more information check out our blog posts looking at 17 luxury brands with poor web user experience or how Mulberry’s new responsive site shows luxury brands how to do UX.
If you don’t think identity plays a significant role in user experience, think again.
Case in point: I was recently browsing my favorite footwear site on my smartphone for the perfect pair of shoes, but when I returned to purchase my pair of choice via desktop, I had to spend upwards of 10 minutes trying to find it again.
How much better would my experience have been if I had instead been greeted with a personalized product showcase featuring my ‘most recently browsed’ items?
It’s clear that brands’ current priority is uniting data. Companies are striving for the single customer view, allowing smarter marketing and increasing customer lifetime value or better mapping the customer journey.
Even in the UK, where online shopping is at it highest (compared to offline), the percentage of transactions that happen online is around 13%. That’s 87% of purchases happening somewhere in the real world.
That’s 87% of customer purchase data that brands and retailers want to capture, if they are to identify and market to all of their customers online (providing they opt in).
And, of course, there are some products bought relatively infrequently online, as a percentage of overall sales. Cosmetics is a good example.
Club Clarins is nothing new, it’s nearly two years old. But, the scheme is a simple and effective attempt to incentivise customers to hand over some purchase-history data online, after they’ve purchased a Clarins product in a department store.
I thought it was worth discussing loyalty schemes in the context of brands’ pursuit of the omnichannel grail when selling wholesale and retail.
Econsultancy and Tealium have launched the 2014 Data Unification Survey, which looks “under the hood” of one of the most misunderstood (and highest) priorities in marketing.
Respondents who complete the survey will receive a complimentary, advance copy of the full and final research report, slated for a late Q2 release. The report will be sold for $695 (£450).
Analysts (like us) have been preaching for years about the power of aligning customer data and marketing applications.
Building a single customer view that can simultaneously benefit from application data while guiding those applications should be a priority for organizations using or working toward a data-driven marketing model.
Since December 2010, US smartphone engagement has increased three-fold from 131bn total minutes spent on the device per month to 442bn by December 2013.
Although tablets were very much in their infancy in 2010, they too have seen a mighty increase over the same period, a 10-fold growth to 124bn minutes per month.
These figures come from comScore’s latest report on the future of digital in the US.
It states that smartphones alone have surpassed desktop usage in 2013, with 429bn minutes now spent on the previously dominant screen.
Here’s a look at the current state of a multi-platform USA.
As our world continues to become a much smaller place, the ability to buy goods online from other countries is on the rise.
One valuable target group for UK online retailers are US customers shopping on their sites.
We’ve used our own data to explore the shopping behaviour of this particular customer group to help UK ecommerce companies maximise the revenue opportunity these shoppers bring.
As more customers use their mobiles when shopping offline and retailers worry about showrooming, iBeacons could become very useful for marketers.
The technology is still relatively new, and retailers and other businesses are just beginning trials using iBeacons.
Here are five examples of how the technology is being used…
There are many great examples of how Netflix uses data to personalise user experience.
However, the real lesson for marketers is less obvious and has more to do with the underlying ‘value exchange’ taking place.
Online retailers are struggling to unearth the reasons why shoppers abandon their sites without converting.
Econsultancy recent Reducing Customer Struggle report reveals that a staggering 73% of the companies surveyed admit that they are unaware of the abandonment reasons
“I’m just browsing” is reported as one of the major abandonment reasons. This reason accounts for anywhere between 37% to 57% of the total online shoppers who left without buying.