The cx guide: retail experts on the pandemic, peak and 2021 predictions

The biggest change for CX? Retailers are listening now.

“It always felt like customers were pulling everybody along with the things that they wanted,” says Julia, who notes that retailers have been chasing their own tails when it comes to direction for innovation.

In the past, brands took customer behaviour signals and worked them into project or transformation plans – but ‘data drowning’ and conflicting cues often meant that there were too many leads to follow or problems to solve all at once.

The pandemic has unarguably revealed what customers truly want, and retailers now need to listen.

Julia says, throughout 2020 and into 2021, retailers can drill it down to three, uniform things; customers want speed, ease and visibility with every ecommerce transaction. And, with very little time or resource for hesitation, they’re the pillars on which the industry can confidently build better customer service.

Now, retailers have the creative licence to rip up the rule book and get creative with how they do it. Julia stresses that there’s never been a better time to experiment, learn quickly and find new ways of doing things.

Meeting customer expectations really is an all-year-round job, even before the pandemic, especially when the peak of peak is in October…
For Julia and the Party Delights team, Halloween is usually one of (if not the)  busiest date in the calendar – with up to 25% volume uplift. As usual, everyone needs to be at optimum speed, accuracy and efficiency; and it’s very much all hands on deck. However, this year, there are significantly fewer hands on deck…

Watch the video to find out how Party Delights are managing traffic this Halloween (and how they’re hoping to keep it scare-free).

It was very clear, from talking with Jonathan, that an obsession with customer behaviour is the only thing that’s going to differentiate between a retailer that meets customer expectations, and a retailer that exceeds them.
Starting with the way shoppers can contact a customer service team…

“We just need to make sure that we are wherever the customer wants us to be.” Says Jonathan.

This can be influenced by the power of surveying customers, as listening to customer feedback on new contact channels should drive business strategy.

“It’s an ever-changing landscape of new digital channels that are available to customers. And we just need to make sure that we keep up with the trend of those channels, to make sure that we’re always putting those channels available and in front of the customer.”

With multiple contact methods, and more demand for products and services, retailers have faced peak volumes of customer enquiries for multiple months during 2020 – often operating with reduced staff numbers and delivery network disruption.

One of the most effective solutions for a steep rise in contact centre activity is to allow customers to answer their own questions.

“We’ve put some more self-serve tactics in place, which not only helps us but also helps the customer as well.” Says Jonathan. This has been one of the key actions that musicMagpie took to drive down the influx of customer enquiries during lockdown, a figure which is now back to pre-pandemic levels.

“We managed to maintain our service levels, it’s something that I’ve been quite proud of.”

Self-serve is particularly useful for ‘where is my order?’ calls, which are the most common enquiry type for retailers. If customers can check the status of delivery, and track their parcel, without needing input from the call centre – it lowers inbound contacts, reduces cost-to-serve and speeds up issue resolution. Everyone is happy.

For more insight on how the world’s largest eBay and Amazon seller has handled customer experience during the pandemic, check out the full video interview.

“By the time we come to broadcast this this interview, we will have delivered to one million brand new addresses.” Tim told us during our video call.

And he wasn’t wrong. DPD have now been to over a million new households this year; these are new consumers, people buying online for the first time, people buying from different retailers for the first time or people buying different products for the first time. This is an ‘eye opener’ for the shift in shopping habits in 2020, and a barometer of the growth in the ecommerce market for 2021.

With that, comes the challenge of ensuring all customers – new and old – have the doorstep experience they expect. Tim notes that customers are more likely to stay loyal to a retailer if they have a good delivery experience, so it’s really down to the carrier to look after the customer ‘as if they’re their own’.

DPD have split the year into parts: peak 1 (the surge and stabilisation of lockdown-driven volume) and peak 2 (the traditional, Golden Quarter shopping season). They’re expecting current ecommerce levels to change only by rising, with record numbers remaining for many months.

Segmenting the two peak periods has allowed intelligent planning and forecasting, with huge investments made to make sure they have the confidence to carry on serving the country throughout the rest of the year… and, of course, into 2021 and beyond.

Watch the full interview to find out more.

With a whole host of new customers to impress, retailers have one shot to care for and keep the shoppers who are new to ecommerce.

“Swathes of customers who previously didn’t shop online, who preferred stores, have all become digitally literate. Because they had to be.” Says James, who suggests that these ecommerce converts won’t be rushing back to their old ways. “There will still be a greater number of consumers who are going to want to reduce time spent in physical stores.”

And it’s true. There are thousands of new online shoppers, who will be sticky to the brands that give them the best customer experience. So what has the pandemic meant for store space?

For the past five years or so, experiential retail has been one of the most expensive buzzwords in the industry. From concept stores, to bricks and mortar ‘show rooms’, to the likes of Klarna, with their ground-breaking pop-ups. Now there is less emphasis on physical store space, and more emphasis on controlled capacity, and getting customers in and out as quickly as possible.

This was one of the many interesting points James made, during our chat. And it’s interesting to hear how this may impact in-store concessions or events.

Are we losing the built-in coffee shop, as the high street moves away from being the ritualistic social venue? Have we seen an end to the champagne launch event or the in-store yoga classes?

“I think consumers will still want retailers who provide an experience,” says James. “They still want to shop with retailers that provide a kind of branded world that you can step into.”

The rethinking and repurposing of the store space isn’t, in itself, a new thing. For years now, innovative retailers have been considering how they respond to the steady, but drastic, shift towards ecommerce. Customers have been moving online for years, and the pandemic has been a catalyst for change.

Destination shopping has been one route. But now, the bells and whistles don’t matter. There are hundreds of lifeless store units, housing untapped stock and shop floor staff with fewer customers to serve. A simple pivot to a ship from store model could very easily save both the retailer and the customer time and money.

Is hyperlocal fulfilment the new ‘retail theatre’?

In the video chat, James discussed drive-through stores and other new retailer models that we’ve seen land during lockdown.

As we know, most retailers are seeing an extended, ongoing peak at the moment. And, according to Paul, we can already tell that most will continue to trade at these levels throughout the rest of 2020.

With a nationwide spotlight shone on the importance of delivery and logistics networks throughout 2020, the customer’s awareness of the carrier brand is more important than ever this peak.

So could this be a new battleground? Could we be about to see customers shopping around for carrier options, as they do price?

If this becomes a theme, and customers have developed brand loyalty with specific carriers (or even specific local delivery drivers) during lockdown, we could be about to see a very interesting shift in conversion factors at the checkout.

Multi-carrier delivery offering is one way to mitigate the risk of drop out, motivated by positive or negative carrier experience.

Although loyalty, to brand or carrier, is key, Paul predicts that customers have reflected and realigned their priorities a lot this year… “The onset of COVID has certainly driven some changes in behaviour and our delivery preferences, clearly,” says Paul, who notes that there’s been an attitude shift in 2020; customers are questioning whether they need their items next day or same day, and they seem to be making more considered purchases with less focus on returns. Either driven by pressure on key workers, sustainability, access to stores or simply generational reflections on ‘what’s really important’ when it comes to shopping—people are perhaps being slightly more considered with their purchases.

Lynsey (Hermes) echoed the sentiment around putting control in the customer’s hands, and made the point around how mapping customer journeys and tying communications together would be more critical than ever in the coming months. James (Ascential Retail Week) has really highlighted how new customers in the market, previously preferring physical stores, are there for retailers to catch and keep… meaning loyalty is a currency only earned by impressing in the post-purchase experience. Paul (Wincanton) mentioned that consumer awareness of final mile carriers is much more heightened this year, so it’s no wonder customers are watching delivery with a beady eye. Because when delivery is the only physical touch point, and often the most varied or risky part of the customer journey, there’s no excuse for bad experience.

Chris (Cygnia) predicted that the months of ecommerce high volume we’ve witnessed this year won’t be slowing any time soon, and that peak in 2020 is likely to be less pronounced and more spread out than we’ve seen before. So, when it comes to forecasting, planning and implementing change in the ‘new world’, the points from Julia (Party Delights) ring true; the pandemic has taught a lot of retailers that they can move at a speed previously unheard of, so now is the time to quickly test and learn, and move decisively in business decisions. Keeping in mind, of course, the prediction from Tim (DPDGroup UK), that the most biggest impacting change in 2021 is likely to come from smaller, incremental refinements and changes… so it really is all about being agile and flexible with the technology impacting your end customer experience.