Digitalization Trends Boost Customer Satisfaction
The retail industry is at a critical turning point with increased consumer spending and a demand for more technological advancements. A positive customer experience is crucial for retailers achieving success. According to PWC, 32% of all customers would stop doing business with a brand they loved after one bad experience.
Just think about a recent shopping experience you’ve had where the bathroom’s hygienic standards were very low. Have you gone back to that particular store? Has this affected your perspective on the brand as a whole? Advanced technology can grant a real-time view of insights such as frequency of bathroom usage to retailers and prevent negative customer experiences before they even occur.
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Maintaining overall customer satisfaction through digitalization can reduce costs and save time, energy and resources. There are more benefits to incorporating further digitalizations within your building to consider, so let’s explore how digitalization trends are boosting customer satisfaction and improving operational performance.
Efficiency Is Key to Increased Customer Satisfaction
Technology advancements cause a chain reaction of positive benefits for retailers. Technologies today are helping retailers understand customer behaviors and allow employees to quickly address issues. According to a recent study, 64% of individual workers reported that they obtain value from technologies such as AI. What’s more, a surprising 60% feel that these tools are like a member of the team rather than a threat.
Retailers can empower their employees to have better control of their time management and outlook on tasks, while also having full visibility into their business performance to make strategic and timely decisions that can drastically improve ROI. They’re able to quickly respond to customer feedback and maintain high levels of satisfaction.
Effortlessly Minimize Risk
Mitigating risk is crucial in the retail industry, as unexpected or unaddressed issues can be costly from a business and customer perspective. Advanced technology can support risk mitigation by removing slow and tedious manual processes that otherwise expose retailers to costly human error and delay. When juggling numerous tasks, retail employees can be prone to filling out logbooks incorrectly, increasing an organization’s risk of missing information. If unchecked, these mistakes can hinder the company’s ability to ensure essential compliance requirements are met.
With streamlined workflows and improved data accuracies, retailers can efficiently recognize and implement necessary corrective actions uncovered in real-time data reports and compliance audits to ensure logs are entered properly. Understanding the growing inefficiencies and potential risks in current manual processes is the first and instrumental step that retailers can take.
Resolve Issues in Real Time
A digitized approach to retail management operations can also save valuable resources and resolve concerns quickly through workflow automation. One approach is incorporating Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, which transform IoT data into smart retail insights. The sensors are helping management improve operations while driving productivity gains and cost savings.
For example, let’s say a fully stocked refrigerator breaks down in a grocery store, and a customer uncovers it hours later. Frustrations aside, reporting delays such as this can inhibit retailers in numerous ways, from creating a poor customer experience and losing valuable merchandise, to even exposing the retailer to the risk of generating food-related illness from malfunctioning equipment.
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IoT smart sensors capture real-time data such as temperature increases in a broken refrigerator. Workflow systems can then automate the necessary response, such as scheduling a repair and moving merchandise to a working refrigerator. This saves time on getting repairs implemented, energy on labor hours spent by the management team to resolve an issue, and costs associated with unhappy customers or lost merchandise.
Challenges
Implementing these technologies can come with some initial challenges, such as costs for setup to incorporate a new software. Additionally, older systems may not be compatible with new digitized technologies. With enough research and limited disruptions, however, your chosen technologies should work out just fine. Retailers should also keep privacy and protection against breaches in mind when incorporating digitalization technologies in a building.
In conclusion, by implementing advanced technology and digitalization within the retail space, retailers can create a more efficient work environment with streamlined tasks and automated workflows – thus increasing customer satisfaction, consistent consumer loyalty, and ultimately boosting ROI. Retailers can also empower their employees to have better control of their time management and outlook on tasks, while also having full visibility into their business performance to make strategic and timely decisions. To remain competitive, retailers should take the time to evaluate operational processes, data transparency and workflows to determine opportunities for improvement and ultimately success.
