What Will Tomorrow’s Customer Experience Leaders Look Like?

While price points and product quality often claim headlines surrounding what drives consumer sales — and indeed, according to a PwC report, these factors hold the top two places on that metric — customer experience may be the most quickly evolving factor in retail, both in-store and online.

The report noted a significant gap between shopper expectations and actual experiences, underscoring that while many retailers and service providers were busy touting the latest-and-greatest tech tools at their disposal, the thoughtful (and actual) integration of these same tools was lacking.

“What truly makes for a good experience? Speed. Convenience. Consistency. Friendliness. And one big connector: human touch—that is, creating real connections by making technology feel more human and giving employees what they need to create better customer experiences,” the PwC paper stated.

Other notable data points pulled from the report included:

• Retail was the No. 4 category in terms of the size of the expectations versus experience gap: Trailing airlines, healthcare, and pharma, retail shoppers rate the importance of CX at 73%, while actual satisfaction came in at just 49%.
• When it comes to the essentials, Americans want efficiency, intelligence, and hospitality: Speed, convenience, knowledgeable assistance, and friendly interactions and service were the top four elements that U.S. shoppers cited as being foundational to great CX.
• Bad experiences are best avoided: While U.S. consumers were more forgiving of a single incident of bad customer service (~19% said they would keep interacting with a brand they loved if this were to occur), repeated instances were too much to bear (~59% said as much).
• Tech can’t solve problems when things go wrong in a big way: When the question was posed of “Once technology becomes advanced we won’t need people for great customer experiences,” only 23% of American shoppers strongly agreed, offset by 55% who strongly disagreed.

Customer Experience Trends See Tech Tools in a Symbiotic Relationship With Skilled Human CX Leadership

A recent trend report issued by Jumpmind also tackled this question, terming “clienteling” as the process of identifying one’s most valued customers and then gaining a more complete portrait of their desires, needs, and preferences in order to provide an omnichannel CX that ranks among the best.

“Gone are the days of retailers accepting disparate devices, different user interfaces, and technologies. In the retail technology revolution, empowering store associates with clienteling solutions that provide transparency into customer history allows them to deliver experiences that strengthen the customer’s relationship with your brand,” Jumpmind wrote, offering their modular POS tech solution (the Composable Store), as one option.

PwC seemed to reinforce the importance of flexibility, both in terms of automated solutions and the learning that those tools need to do by being fed strong human CX interactions.

“Take advantage of automation, but make sure customers can reach a human when one is needed. In turn, automated solutions should ‘learn’ from human interactions so those experiences also improve. This shift allows your employees to be more engaged when they’re needed, provide better service and get necessary support from technology—as part of the seamless experience. This will require a change in how companies measure customer service performance. For instance, instead of measuring call volume, companies may look to the number of successful solutions they provided for a customer.” PwC wrote, noting that despite all of the current focus on ecomm, in-store business remained on the upswing writ large.