CPaaS for retail: how to attract and retain your employees and customers.

It’s been nearly thirty years since the first online retail transaction. On 11th August 1994, the Sting album “Ten Summoner’s Tales” was sold on the U.S. retail platform, NetMarket.

Today, the world of retail couldn’t be more different—and retailers are struggling to keep up with a seemingly endless tide of change.

There’s the shift to digital-first retail communications, more empowered and selective customers, and the “great attrition” that’s seen frontline retail workers leave the industry in droves. It’s a lot to think about.

This blog will look at how an enterprise-grade Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) can help you respond to these challenges and deliver a more efficient and connected retail experience for your customers and employees.

Drive meaningful change with CPaaS

The connected customer has never been more empowered. And competition for their attention and business has never been more fierce - that means they’re much more likely to scrutinize the brands they use, especially when it comes to the end-to-end service journey.

So, what do they want? It’s simple: they’re looking for flexible, personalized, contextual brand interactions and experiences that move seamlessly across their favorite digital channels. If you can deliver that, then significant revenue and word-of-mouth praise from happy customers are both up for grabs.

61% of customers said they’d pay retailers more if they thought they would get a higher standard of customer service.

In our recent CX study, 75% of customers said that good customer service is a reason for repeat business, and 61% said they’d pay retailers more if they thought they would get a higher standard of customer service.

Likewise, retail employees increasingly expect the same connected and personalized interactions from their employers as they do from brands when shopping in their own time. And that includes proactive, context-aware notifications and alerts.

With the right CPaaS solution, you can innovate, automate and orchestrate personalized customer and employee experiences at scale—all from a single, cloud-based platform. Here are some powerful use-cases helping retail brands like yours enhance the end-to-end user journey and improve operational efficiencies for employees and customers alike.

Purchase flexibility and proactive updates

Did you know that 75% of consumers now prefer to engage with brands using real-time messaging channels? Most brands have made initial investments in real-time messaging to serve customers; now many are trying to solve for vendor, channel and information fragmentation. But mastering conversational commerce is more than just a way to enhance the CX, it can reduce pressure on your contact center resources too.

By providing timely updates as orders move through the supply chain, you reduce the need for customers to seek reassurance from your contact center agents. This includes using chatbots to automate real-time order confirmation, dispatch, and time of delivery notifications—plus access to flexible fulfilment options such as curbside pickup, buy online, and pick up in-store (BOPIS).

For example, a customer may receive a dispatch alert via SMS but realize they’re unlikely to be home on the assigned date. So, they text back asking for the parcel to be sent to their nearest store for retrieval the following evening. Using a combination of natural language processing (NLP) and A.I., your CPaaS chatbot responds quickly and processes the information through your backend systems to fulfill the request.

While automating routine service interactions and providing flexible fulfilment options can improve CX and reduce contact center traffic, it’s vital that customers can still access live agents when appropriate. With the right CPaaS solution, an A.I. chatbot can seamlessly filter and pass conversations onto human agents to field more complex and sensitive interactions.

Smarter connections between retailers and customers

See how we have helped some of the world’s biggest retailers integrate multi-channel experiences that keep them connected to their customers.

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Streamline returns management

U.S. shoppers are expected to return $173 billion worth of holiday purchases in 2023—that’s 28% more than the previous year. And when the typical cost of processing a return averages $30, retailers must make this as simple, accessible, and efficient as possible.

Customers expect returns to be as fast and flexible as the initial checkout and delivery processes. With CPaaS, you can empower customers to initiate product returns using their preferred digital channels by deploying an automated chatbot or live agent.

Flexible platform integrations with e-commerce sites, digital channels, and your backend systems enable a two-way transfer of real-time customer and logistical data. This gives supply chain and logistics teams the end-to-end visibility required to optimize the returns journey while ensuring customers can still return the product when, where and how it makes sense for them.

After the return is complete, you can also trigger automated surveys to gauge customer satisfaction and identify areas for improvement.

Retail marketing communications

With a world of choice available at the touch of a screen, the contest for consumer attention has never been fiercer. For marketers, this means engaging customers in the right place and time with tailored ads and personalized messaging.

CPaaS provides a centralized, 360-degree view of the customer journey, enabling marketers to build omnichannel campaigns and target segmented audiences based on their personal preferences and engagement history. This includes sharing promotional, transactional, and conversational messaging based on contextual triggers.

For example via SMS or WhatsApp, marketers may share:

• Loyalty rewards

• Seasonal discounts

• Personalized offers

• Restock alerts

• Order pickup reminders

Plus, customers can respond to notifications and take advantage of offers without leaving the channel. The best CPaaS solutions also let I.T. teams use APIs to embed digital channels into online marketing, such as on web pages that let customers sign up for promotions.

Enhancing internal communications

Limited growth opportunities, inflexible working cultures, and a lack of autonomy and control are among the top drivers behind the recent mass exodus of retail workers. And with 63% of frontline retail managers thinking of quitting soon, it’s clear that business as usual is no longer enough to retain staff.

Hiring and training new employees is costly and time-consuming—and while you can’t change the nature of retail work overnight, there are small but meaningful changes you can make to better engage, support, and empower your employees.

Discover Webex Connect for Retail

Webex Connect is an enterprise-grade CPaaS for orchestrating and automating end-to-end customer journeys in a single, cloud based solution. And it lets you centrally implement all the use cases covered in this blog and more to deliver incredible customer and employee experiences that build true brand loyalty.

As a global CPaaS leader, our Tier 1 messaging network, automation tools, and flexible platform integrations provide the foundation you need to hit the ground running and start delivering rich and engaging retail communications.

Manage customer consent, channel preferences, campaign orchestration, and privacy and compliance in one place, streamlining operations and empowering your employees to do more—with less.

To learn more about what Webex Connect can do for your organization—including our solution ideation, deployment, and maintenance services—please get in touch. You can also sign up for a free solution demo here.