Despite the emergence of exciting new tools like virtual reality and artificial intelligence, sometimes it’s important to go back to basics.
Improving your retail strategy could be as simple as connecting more closely with consumers and using technology more efficiently.
That’s the takeaway message from the inaugural State of Technology in Retail report, released on Tuesday morning by the product decision platform MakerSights.
The survey found that for 43 percent of retail respondents, understanding customer preferences is still their biggest challenge when bringing new product to market, beating out inventory management and retail pricing. Forty-one percent also reported that acquiring and retaining customers was the most pressing challenge in retail as a whole.
https://footwearnews.com/2019/business/retail/customer-feedback-makerinsights-report-technology-retailers-1202739050/
One of the goals of agile development is to reduce the distance between the developers and the person who will benefit from their labors: The Customer.
When the customer and the developer are close to one another, the idea is that the solutions created are best aligned to what the user really wants. There is a lower chance of miscommunication. Misunderstandings are likely to be cleaned up quickly.
How are you and your team doing on that front?
https://it.toolbox.com/blogs/dennisstevenson/are-your-customers-inspiring-your-scrum-team-012919/
Asking for customer feedback gives valuable insight into how your customers perceive your brand. Whether it’s positive or negative, you can use the collected information to adjust and provide a better experience. It also results in a stronger seller-buyer relationship since customers’ opinion are valued and appreciated. So how and where do you collect this precious feedback?
https://mopinion.com/how-to-use-email-marketing-to-get-feedback-from-loyal-customers/
Retail Gazette hears from Iceland customer response lead Rachel Lewis on the importance of giving customers a voice, and how AI-powered reviews and insights inform their campaigns, including the retailer’s mission to reduce its environment impact.
https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2019/02/5-minutes-with-rachel-lewis-customer-response-lead-iceland/
A recent survey by Stanford Social Innovation Review confirmed a surprising fact: in an era where customer feedback is ubiquitous in the for-profit world, both doers and donors in the social innovation sphere struggle to systematically understand the preferences and experiences of the people they are seeking to help: the nonprofit customer.
To be sure, social innovators want to understand their client’s needs. The survey found that 88% of 1,986 respondents reported that “gathering feedback” was one of their priorities in measuring impact. But only 13% were using it as a top source of insight for improving services; and two-thirds said that lack of staff capacity and resources were the major barrier to implementing feedback systems.
https://hbr.org/2019/02/why-customer-feedback-tools-are-vital-for-nonprofits/
"Two weeks ago, I posted “Is Customer Experience a Missed Opportunity?” and shared CCW’s 2018 Market Survey. The report discussed the fact that many customer experience (CX) programs are failing to drive change. There were multiple takeaways; only 9% of programs said their primary use of journey maps was “to ‘orchestrate’ predictive and/or proactive engagement,” whereas 31% primarily used them “to fix ‘pain points’ in the experience.” This was one of many reasons CX hasn’t been having a strong impact in many organizations."
http://customerthink.com/why-your-cx-program-isnt-winning/
“Our company is trying to get away from Big Design Up Front. Why doesn’t UX get fast feedback and iterate?” the conference attendee asked. Considering a multi-step process, he asked why UX doesn’t design step 1, deliver that, design step 2, deliver that, etc.
Imagine your company is setting up a new workflow for a customer to register and sign up for your system. The customer will need to complete a process where they create an account (or at least choose a password), select the level of service wanted, enter payment details, review the order, then complete it and get a confirmation message.
https://www.cmswire.com/digital-experience/why-doesnt-ux-get-fast-feedback-and-iterate/
If you’re the leader of an enterprise software company and “innovation” isn’t on the top of your list of priorities for 2019, I encourage you to reconsider.
While it might be tempting to dismiss innovation as little more than a buzzword, research clearly shows that companies who invest in innovation are more successful. Look no further than the paper in MIT Sloan Management Review, Are Innovative Companies Profitable, which highlights a strong correlation between how successful a company is at generating innovative ideas, and the speed at which the company grew.
For enterprise software companies, I’d argue that it’s particularly important to invest in innovation efforts now because the enterprise software market is growing so quickly. According to Research And Markets paper, Global Enterprise Software Market Outlook to 2022, the global enterprise software market is will have a 5.47% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over the next few years. Gartner also estimates that the amount of money that IT will spend on enterprise software will grow in 2019 by at least 8 percent.
http://customerthink.com/how-enterprise-software-companies-can-innovate-feedback-moonshots-and-hackathons/
For any business, the experience you provide customers through your contact centre, and the journey they have with you has the largest impact on satisfaction and retention. However, making sure that your customers are happy isn’t always an easy task.
Each interaction is unique and comes with its own challenges. That’s why we’ve created a list of 5 ways you can help improve your customer’s experience.
https://contact-centres.com/top-5-tips-for-improving-your-customers-experience/
Are you responsible for measuring the progress in improving customer experience? If yes, I’m sure you needed to come up with a rationale on which metrics to choose for this: Is it an all ubiquitous Net Promoter Score (NPS), the traditional customer satisfaction CSAT, or a more recent invention Customer Effort Score (CES)?
Is one enough or should you implement several metrics? Does it actually matter? Here, we discuss the two arguments: Pro and against.
http://customerthink.com/does-it-matter-which-customer-experience-metric-you-choose-2/
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