BrainTrust Query: Will digitally-based customer assistance help solve store customer service woes?
Plenty of our posts have navel-gazed the ongoing challenges of in-store customer service and how we might resolve them. Exciting new technologies are now appearing that may empower retailers with a solution.
The first is live assisted selling provided by start-up Experticity (www.experticity.com) where a shopper touches a kiosk or digital screen to activate a customer service session via streaming video. Highly trained agents not only provide a superior sales experience, but they also open up new possibilities for up-selling, cross-selling and suggested selling. Like a concierge, they provide targeted product selection advice, can pull up relevant web-based information, show diagrams of how products work and even consult on design projects.
Forrester's Tamara Mendelsohn feels that the technology is compelling. "They offer something really unique that I haven't seen anywhere else," she told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "It is at a time that makes a lot of sense because it offers not just cold technology, but a human interaction, too."
Another flavor is the 3D virtual sales assistant like the one created by Fastrak Retail (www.fastrakretail.com). Also living on a kiosk or digital screen, a retailer creates a "digital personality" that becomes a branded Virtual Sales Associate. The digital associate interacts with the shopper in typed or written word and reaches into an intelligent software engine to provide product specs, promotions, videos and cross-sell/up-sell. The entire process is aided by artificial intelligence and natural language processing to make the experience feel very real and comfortable.
Both of these technologies can be designed to allow shoppers to speak in other languages to cater to multicultural customers. They can also tie into loyalty programs, shopper CRM data and/or past purchase behavior to add personalization and relevance to the shopper session.
A late 2006 McKinsey article, The 'Moment of Truth' in Customer Service, speaks candidly about the importance of handling customer service properly when a shopper has an immediate need. It's during these personal interactions that shoppers invest a high amount of emotional energy in the outcome - and the way that these moments are handled can make or break brand loyalty. McKinsey also states that executives typically struggle to transform the way a company responds to its customers and often rely too much on IT while performing poorly on the front line.
Discussion Questions: Do new digitally based customer service assistants have the potential to transform store-level support? What associated value will it take to stimulate acceptance from both retailers and shoppers?
Companies such as Experticity and Fastrak are creating solutions laser focused on helping retailers provide better levels of customer service in-store. No one can deny the need for this, as their offerings are building much needed (and demanded) bridges between internet retailing best practices and the brick and mortar store. No, we should not expect them to completely solve the customer service issues. However, it would be remiss not to utilize these types of creative, compelling tools to offer a store customer service option in a method that retailers can tightly control - something not always possible with human beings on the floor.
A challenge may be that retailers will likely demand hard dollar ROI measurements for their investment in these tools. But how can you definitively measure the impact of a shopper that you retain due to a positive digital assistance experience vs. the many that you may lose without it? Are they measuring the impact of a slacker employee snubbing a shopper and losing her forever?
- In the Money - Seattle Post-Intelligencer
- The 'Moment of Truth' in Customer Service - McKinsey Quarterly (membership required)