How to Boost Customer Retention in Retail

The customer journey has changed a lot over the years. Customers are doing more research on products and interacting with more brands through more channels than ever before.

In the face of this digital transformation, you need to make sure you stand out from your competitors. And crafting a stellar customer experience is one of the easiest ways to differentiate yourself and improve your customer retention.

In this article, we’ll explore the importance of customer experience and tools that you can use to improve your customer relationships.

Why is customer experience (CX) important?

In short, customer experience is important because customers have a ton of choices. This means that you need to stand out from the crowd on more than the basis of price and products. Interacting with your brand should be a positive and frictionless experience at every touchpoint.

To help you create a great customer experience beyond your store, we’re sharing a few strategies and tools that will up your CX game.

Make getting customer support as convenient as possible

The best part of online shopping: you don’t need to talk to anyone and you can do it from your couch or while you’re at work. It’s really quick and convenient to get everything you need with just a few taps.

The worst part of online shopping: you can’t talk to a retail salesperson and ask product-specific questions before you make your purchase.

To solve this issue, plenty of e-commerce shops have started to introduce chatbots. For frequently asked questions, the chatbots have pre-programmed responses. But you can also set up chatbots to connect customers with your customer service team so that your customers get real-time quality answers to their questions. This helps to reduce purchase barriers while providing customers with a personalized online shopping experience. Great customer service should extend beyond your physical shop.

Engage your customers on social media

Another way to improve your customer experience is to invest in your brand’s online presence, especially on social media. Did you know that there are around 25 million brands on Instagram, and 80% of Instagram users follow at least one business account?

A regular posting schedule is an effective way to stay in front of your audience through native ads and curated content, share your unique personality, engage with prospective and current customers, offer instant customer service, and manage your public image. You’ll also have an engaging and cost-effective way to share your promotions and new product launches with your core customers.

A social media scheduling tool, like Sprout Social or Hootsuite can make it easier to stick to a regular posting schedule. Beyond scheduling, these tools can also help you track your mentions, chime in on relevant conversations, and curate better content for your audience with social listening features.

Stay connected with your customers by offering rewards

As a customer engagement company, we’d be remiss not to mention digital loyalty programs on the list of tech tools to improve customer retention.

Did you know that over 70% of millennials and Generation Z are members of at least one loyalty program? The reason most brands opt to offer loyalty rewards programs is because they provide a great opportunity to get insights while giving customers more of what they want.

With this said, simply offering a loyalty program isn’t enough to yield loyal and engaged brand advocates. To cultivate these customer relationships, you’ll need to use the customer insights and marketing tools that your program provides to send them relevant communications and offers that keep them coming back to you.

Essentially, you should always be asking yourself how you can give your customers the best brand experience.

Here are a few ways a loyalty program can help you create a customer experience that stands out:

• Automate birthday offers to encourage customers to come back
• Automate “win-back” emails or texts if your customer hasn’t purchased anything in a while
• Encourage social media engagement in exchange for points
• Encourage the creation of user-generated content about your brand
• Curate personalized and relevant offers based on purchase history

Ultimately, providing a personalized and engaging customer experience is the key to improving customer retention. Learn how to enhance your in-store experience with 9 Tips to Improve Customer Experience in Retail.