Curbside pickup, simpler returns, and chatbots: How CPaaS drives modern retail use cases.

Ten years ago, ecommerce accounted for less than 10% of all retail purchases–but by 2025, it's projected that nearly 1 in 4 purchases will be made online. The rise of digital native retailers has disrupted and reinvented customer experience, putting enormous pressure on traditional brick and mortar retailers to innovate and evolve digital engagement to win and retain customers. The prolific rise of ecommerce and online channels has given customers more control, more flexibility and greater personalization throughout their retail journeys.

This shift to consumer empowerment is the great challenge facing retailers today. But it’s also an opportunity. While cost, complexity, siloed legacy systems, and conflicting priorities are key challenges for retailers in their mission to evolve and enhance customer experience, it’s more important than ever to get it right. Digital and hybrid retail experiences are now key battlegrounds for improving efficiency, reducing overheads, and winning consumer trust.

Forward-thinking retailers that can deliver personalized interactions, flexible shopping options, and seamless returns will be able to pull ahead of those still working in silos and relying on disconnected processes.

The great retail industry challenge

As modern technologies continue to empower customers, shoppers expect more and more from their retail experiences. Now, consumers are looking for:

1.     Proactive, real-time order updates

2.     Flexible shopping options like curbside pickup

3.     Seamless refund and return journeys delivered on rich interactive channels

4.     Personalized interactions across the entire purchasing experience

Satisfying each of these expectations on their own is a significant challenge. Tackling them simultaneously across all channels is more complex still—especially considering they typically involve a variety of legacy systems, different functional groups and a patchwork of fragmented vendor capabilities. That’s why many retailers are turning to Communications Platforms as a Service (CPaaS) solutions to simplify how they build, deploy, and manage complex customer journeys.

How does CPaaS help retailers meet today’s customer expectations?

The right CPaaS solution helps retailers build rich, contextual, joined-up customer journeys. They also empower customer-facing staff to deliver flexible, seamless, personalized experiences and proactive updates across all stages of the buying and retention cycle.

But how does this look in practice?

Curbside pickup, powered by two-way communications

Curbside pickup has become widely adopted as modern customers do more of their shopping across a mix of digital and physical channels. But coordinating pickup timings and maximizing customer convenience can be a challenge and certainly goes beyond one-way notifications that an order is ready to be picked up.

Two-way interactions, powered by great CPaaS solutions like Webex Connect, provide customers with various convenient options to notify store staff upon arrival. They can make a call to a provided number, scan a QR code at a designated parking spot, or even effortlessly start a digital chat with store staff. The result? Improved operational efficiency for the retailer and a smoother experience for the customer.

Simpler returns with rich messaging channels

Returns mark a turning point for any retailer. Get it right, and you convert one-time customers into repeat shoppers. Get it wrong, and you risk losses, complaints, and negative sentiment spreading on social media. The trouble is that returns are becoming more prevalent than ever in the online shopping era, meaning every returns process must be consistently excellent to keep all customers happy.

Automating and improving CX at this crucial part of the retail journey is vital—and it’s made much easier with the right CPaaS solution at your side. CPaaS platforms can elevate returns from a nested, complex array of pages on your website to a simple QR code shoppers can scan that takes them to a form that’s pre-populated with their details.

Alternatively, you could build an automated messaging experience for returns through the likes of Apple Messages for Business. With intuitive capabilities like list pickers and rich media, it can create return labels after a short triage to get the returns process moving almost immediately.

And what about tomorrow?

From inbound queries to returns and retention, there are plenty of ways retailers are using CPaaS today to solve their most pressing challenges. But what about the use cases of tomorrow?

Empower the deskless worker

Since remote and hybrid work has become the norm, many workers are now almost entirely deskless. While digital, deskless workers in retail have great freedom, they create complexity for businesses that have to balance control over their accounts, devices, and conversations while allowing customer-facing employees the leeway to wow customers.

Modern CPaaS solutions solve for many of the IT challenges of deskless workers by empowering employees to respond to and manage all interactions from a single place –all while staying within IT security postures, capturing customer engagement data and allowing for run-time updates that avoid lengthy development/release cycles. These solutions can go even further to offer contextual interactions and rapid resolution, with automatic inbound routing based on employee availability, integration with individual Direct Inward Dials, and contact profiles integrated via webhook with a CRM.

Deliver the best experience possible with contextual chatbots

Automation is the key to delivering rapid, contextual, and personalized retail journeys at scale. And modern CPaaS platforms offer powerful tools to automate many interactions via chatbots.

While chatbots today are very capable, the best CPaaS platforms allow tech and non-tech teams alike to collaboratively build chatbots that support multiple languages, leverage existing knowledge sets, seamlessly hand over conversations to live agents, and define responses and actions on a channel-by-channel basis. So, even when automating interactions with a chatbot, you can still support customer journeys with rich channel features like list picker functionality in Apple Messages for Business.

Solve your retail challenges now—and in the future—with the right CPaaS

Whether it’s recent trends like curbside pickup or future use cases around empowering chatbots and deskless workers with new tools, retail challenges are growing and evolving.

A platform like Webex Connect provides comprehensive support for all types of enterprise digital interactions, including proactive outbound communications, two-way conversations, and chatbots. It also offers reusable integration and automation tools, with the ability to seamlessly transfer any customer engagement to a live agent, complete with context and intelligence.

Speak to an expert

Learn more about how modern CPaaS platforms like Webex Connect can support your retail journeys, get in touch with us today.

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