Seven ways to capture customers

Building breakthrough, iconic brands using intelligent communications.

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The ever-expanding reach of retail companies has also wrought havoc with the customer relationship. For generations, customer-facing businesses were small in scale and knew their customers. Shop owners knew customers’ needs, their financial constraints, and could anticipate future requirements. But with new technologies come new challenges to customer-centricity. Without visibility into who the customer is, and why he or she might be shopping, businesses are failing to optimally serve their customers. Some key issues that have resulted in retailers losing business:

In the store:
• Inability to match a sales associate to a customer
• Signage issues (timeliness, specificity, accuracy)
• Merchandise that’s advertised, but absent
• Merchandise that’s running low and customers can’t find a style or size

On the phone:
• Phone calls that take sales associates away from customers
• Long wait times on hold
• Voice mail jail
• Voice availability only when a human is in the store

However, some retailers have managed to really break through and overcome these challenges. Their brand identity is crystal clear to customers who know what to expect and get what they want. When retailers deliver on customer’s brand expectations they achieve profitable growth. They also achieve exceptional customer loyalty and intimidate would-be competitors by delivering unparalleled value. One of the keys here is brand consistency – the retail company looks and works the same across all channels, 24/7, and acts as a valued resource for its customers who wouldn’t dream of switching.

There are a variety of tools to achieve breakthrough status – and with recent advances, communications has become a critical one of these breakthrough tools. Telephony in retail used to be all about dial tone, but Intelligent Communications is helping businesses achieve high levels of customer satisfaction by supporting access to resources across locations and organizations.

What is intelligent communications?

Intelligent communications is the ability to link direct, real-time communication between humans when - and only when - needed to do the job. Intelligent communications is enabled by integrating voice communications into business processes to bring exact and timely service to a customer.

Picture this scenario that is common today: Customer receives an e-mail notification of their recent online purchase. Customer reviews and notices an issue. Customer must look up and then call the customer service #, navigate through a series of prompts, relay the information about the order and discuss the issue for resolution.

Now let’s see what happens when intelligent communications are embedded into this process: A customer who purchased online reviews his confirmation and notices an issue….the customer presses a ‘click to talk’ button. Behind the scenes, the button connects to the communication system, which identifies the need for assistance. It looks up the customers contact information and initializes a phone call between an available agent in the call center and the customer. Simultaneously, it sends the order information to the agent desktop. Now the customer and agent talk, immediately and in an informed way, improving the efficiency of the customer interaction and opening the door to enable the agent to cross-sell or up-sell the customer.

Thus, intelligent communications can really make a difference in a customer’s experience – and greatly impact whether a customer sticks with one retailer or switches to another.

Seven ideas to capture customers and enhance your brand

1. Help associates spend more time with the customer through intelligent call routing. Instead of using traditional telephony models (receptionist, department calling, or the availability model), deploy intelligent call center tools to intercept calls and route them to the right person. Intelligent systems boost productivity, employee and customer satisfaction.

2. Make your store hum by using wireless communication. Wireless technology is dramatically changing the world of retail; wireless handheld computers and mobile point-of-sale devices enable retailers to help customers in real time from wherever they are in the store. Wireless telecom is even bigger. Wireless-enabled sales associates are responsive to customer needs via faster price checks, size assistance, and location of merchandise that hasn’t made it out of the back of the store. It enables instant communication with other departments and other stores.

3. Drive faster decision-making by turning on on-demand IP-based audio conferencing. Retail CIO’s routinely talk about the huge number of reports they generate or meetings they hold to help marketing and merchandise staff get the right information. On-demand audio conferencing can enable faster decisions. Companies that use on-demand conferencing set alerts in their reporting systems. The intelligent communications infrastructure reacts to these alerts by finding the right people at any location and brings them together to respond to the alert.

4. Empower district managers and other traveling staff through unified messaging. Decision-makers previously used whatever phone was available – whether at a gas station, in a store, in the car, or at home. Early efforts to assign logic to call forwarding resulted in long wait times and user frustration. The goal of being able to find a person (instead of a specific location) is critical to retail and the tools to address it are here. Companies can assign a single number to an employee through a combination of distributed, consolidated IP-telephony and unified messaging solutions. When traveling, the office number is automatically bridged to the user’s cell phone. All messages are consolidated on the corporate message server. Travelers access their corporate email through a speech-enabled application. All calls made by the traveler go through the corporate switch enabling them to take advantage of corporate rates, corporate directories and robust telephony features at the office.

5. Anticipate the customer’s desire to make your store their favorite place. As your efforts to attract and retain customers become successful, your business will grow. Intelligent Communications can help to make it happen. Using voice technologies, customers who need help can quickly and easily locate assistance. If merchandise isn’t available it becomes possible to provide immediate access to the call center for order and delivery. Retailers can also leverage their knowledge of the customer to create effective push (newsletters, e-mails) and pull communications (frequent buyer programs) that can increase the stickiness of the customer-retailer relationship.

6. Enable seamless multi-channel communications. Retailers may differentiate between channels but customers don’t – they view retailers as a single integrated business. Retailers need to provide these customers with consistent pricing, promotional offers and communication. At the same time, each channel has its own unique requirements. To capitalize on the multi-channel opportunity businesses can leverage new telephony tools to drive increased demand, customer service and greater profitability across the channels.

7. Enable individual store associates to get the information they need. In some stores the person who knows the least about merchandise is the sales associate. Some retailers address this by creating phone-enabled information centers where sales associates can ask questions of the resident expert. The next step is for retailers to use integration tools to create a link between customer databases and their in-store IP phone system. Catalog retailers have used systems similar to this for years, and have relied on the fast turnaround they provide. This enables these same experts to also be on the floor available to customers.

Disaster recovery issues

Several retailers report that their tabletop drills for disaster response have demonstrated that communications inadequacies surfaced during the drills. Among the potential problems, traveling staff were hard to reach, delaying critical decision-making; companies had difficulty conveying information to store personnel, and providing continual information to affected personnel was a major challenge.

New communications technologies, such as IP Telephony coupled with unified messaging systems and collaborative tools, enable retailers to architect the communications infrastructure to enable them to find employees and bring them into a conversation in a seamless, real-time manner, which helps retailers respond effectively in a disaster.

Justifying the capital expense of modernizing the telecommunications network

The biggest impediment retailers report to modernizing their telephone network is cost and inertia. The old system works, and it’s fully depreciated. However, new capabilities offered by advanced telephone networks can more than justify the effort and expense. Consider this:

• Central management costs less.
• New systems can integrate with existing systems.
• Text messaging is no longer just a nice add-on, it’s a necessity.
• The telephony architecture should be unified, scalable, and bulletproof.
• Business continuity is critical today and new systems are more effective than ever in responding in crisis.
• Network security is absolutely imperative. The tools you use to secure your network must be flexible, easy to configure, and of the highest quality. Older networks can’t deliver that kind of reliability.
• It’s a wireless world! How well will your network work with 802.11 wireless LANs?
• The new system can bring with it unanticipated benefits that will justify the cost.

Remember to be careful with so-called ‘apples-to-apples’ comparisons that focus strictly on costs. There are many high-value benefits that can be realized when Intelligent Communications is implemented well. Among the benefits to look for are:

• Higher sales. Customers appreciate better customer service with faster response times. In the must-read business book, Angel Customers, Demon Customers, Larry Selden observes that retail stores must decide to treat highly profitable customers differently from money-draining customers.
• Higher productivity. You’ll see improved overall store operations and efficiency, as well as simpler and more affordable connections to people in far places. Retail is a highly distributed business – to support a business this broad, it must have communications tools that allow everyone to communicate.
• Quicker, easer access to critical information. The disparity between product inventory report and physical visibility of merchandise creates problems for store managers. Wireless capabilities allow store staff to check physical inventory against a ‘live’ computerized reports in real time.

More productive use of ‘dead time’. Give your employees seamless universal access to the tools, information, and applications they need to help them be more productive. Handheld e-mail devices are such a hit because they allow busy staff to get work done outside the office, anywhere. Get the power of enterprise telephony on Nokia, Motorola, BlackBerry, iPaq and other devices.

• Shorten supply chain delays. Having access to information about products that are actually selling is key to preventing out of stocks.
• Increased store security and loss prevention. Better access to information on suspicious activity as its happening helps stop inventory loss.

The bottom line is that the intelligent enterprise is based on a different value proposition than the traditional enterprise. The advanced intelligent network provides business agility, competitive differentiation, and customer loyalty. Intelligent communications enables a different kind of visibility across your entire company, empowering staff and growing sales.

Avaya enables businesses to achieve superior results by designing, building and managing their communications infrastructure and solutions. For over one million businesses worldwide, including more than 90 percent of the Fortune 500, Avaya's embedded solutions help businesses enhance value, improve productivity and create competitive advantage by allowing people to be more productive and create more intelligent processes that satisfy customers.

For businesses large and small, Avaya is a world leader in secure, reliable IP telephony systems, communications applications and full life-cycle services. Driving the convergence of embedded voice and data communications with business applications, Avaya is distinguished by its combination of comprehensive, world-class products and services. Avaya helps customers across the globe leverage existing and new networks to achieve superior business results. For more information: www.avaya.com

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