Giving customers and staff complete control
Everyone talks about making it easy for customers to do business with you, but what are the practical steps you need to do to achieve that?
With 41% of companies claiming that customer experience optimisation is critical (e-consultancy Customer Experience Optimisation Report), linking all your systems and information together is a crucial first step.
Follow the below steps to ensure you’re not only giving customers a great experience, but also making life easier for your staff:
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Link e-commerce with your CRM. With a wealth of information inside your CRM and your e-commerce system, linking the two and integrating service offerings opens up big opportunities for you to compete. Part of creating a great experience for your customers is about making it personalised and convenient – giving yourself the ability to have “one view” of the customer maximises your opportunity to improve how you engage with your customers. For example, you can use their purchase history to tailor your marketing outreach, or to suggest additional purchases at time of checkout.
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Connect forecasting, availability and routing. For trade supplies retailers and providers, connecting these elements drives internal and external improvements. You can control costs by optimising availability as a result of linking forecasting to sales, and by integrating logistics routing software you can ensure routing and capacity can give customers what they demand, while you control costs. In-store, staff can more easily answer customer queries, particularly around out of stocks, which companies like Ceramic Tile Warehouse have used to increase store service efficiency by 20%.
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Enable business intelligence. Business Intelligence (BI) is not just for large retailers – it offers huge opportunities to improve how you to do business. End to end purchase history makes returns less expensive to manage, and more transparent to customers. You can use BI tools to drive tightly controlled in store price matching, tailored to local competitor behaviour, and to create tailored service experiences for key customers.
The ability to achieve all of these things in a relatively short period of time is available right now. E-commerce systems that have been developed alongside Enterprise scale projects can be made available via the Cloud (or on premise), providing a wealth of functionality that can be deployed quickly and cost effectively.
