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How Retail Business Leaders can Leverage Magento for Superior Customer Experience

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Sandy

Retail therapy-we all need it and love indulging in it. Nothing better than planning the next shiny, new purchase, browsing through multiple products, getting flattered by brands vying for our attention, and finally, the excitement of making the purchase itself and getting our hands on the product. Sounds like a fulfilling journey from start to finish right? Well, a journey it sure is and for brands looking to welcome new customers on board, it’s crucial that they craft the most wonderful journeys of all and continue developing a great relationship after a purchase has been made.

When we talk about customer experience, we are essentially talking about this journey for a large part. From ensuring that their brand gets the right visibility to inspiring loyalty once customers are invested, it’s a task of polishing multiple touchpoints to excite and wow at every step. For retailers today, it’s way more than setting up shop in a good location and stocking up quality products, for great experiences need to be strategized and crafted for both brick-and-mortar stores as well as digital channels such as websites and mobile apps. Additionally, it just so happens that the entire world was rocked by a global pandemic last year and that made providing a great digital retail experience all the more crucial. For many brands relying majorly on physical stores, adopting digital solutions became no longer just important but an essential survival strategy. As evident in this Forbes article, eCommerce registered a 68% YoY growth in the US, and COVID-19 was responsible for driving this upward trend in a big way.

Today, as we are preparing to leave the stringent lockdowns behind us, albeit with caution, physical stores are seeing increasing footfalls. However, what will separate the truly successful retailers from others is the ability to provide a consistently high-quality experience across all their interfaces with the customers. In an effort to quickly build, scale, and deliver superior CX, business leaders are constantly evaluating viable platforms that would facilitate an accelerated go-to-market strategy while being safe and resilient at the same time. This is where Magento has been making a difference.

Before we look at some of the ways Magento makes it easier for enterprises to establish the right kind of connection with their customers, let’s go over a few ways in which you, as a decision-maker in the retail industry, can deliver experiences worth remembering and coming back to:

  1. Be flexible: Ensure that customers are provided a wide range of payment as well as shipping and delivery options. With so much competition all around, doing all the heavy lifting for your customers will go a long way to endear your brand to them

  1. Craft relevance: Make your app or website easy to navigate and understandable to customers by using localization and keeping local preferences and tastes in mind. Having the ability to search for information and access them in their languages can be comforting for consumers and increase their reliance on your product

  1. Engage customers: Leverage novel ways of keeping customers engaged and provide value with every interaction. Think about tossing in a few casual games that can reward customers with loyalty points and get them involved in the conversation around products and services. The more you keep customers invested, the more opportunities you’ll create for upsell/cross-sell.

  1. Personalize offerings: Taking engagement a step forward, always strive to reach customers with offers and products they would love. This requires keeping a close eye on each customer’s browsing and buying habits and recommending more products along similar lines with messaging that always carries a personal touch. As many as 80% of shoppers say that personalization influences their buying decisions.

  1. Be responsive and transparent: Make resolution of queries and issues hassle-free and provide multiple options to customers. Deploy innovative solutions such as chatbots and enable customers to easily track, return and replace items.

Now let’s take a look at how Magento enables you to do all this and more:

  1. An intuitive and flexible page builder: A majority of retailers surveyed mentioned that it’s extremely important to keep updating the content of key pages to improve conversion. As soon as new products are stocked and offers are rolled out, you need to ensure your customers know about them on time and can capitalize. To that end, Magento’s page builder is extremely simple to use with a wide selection of themes, the ability to drag and drop various sections and update content without dependency on design and development teams

  1. PWA studio: Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are extremely important for business leaders looking to deliver a consistently great shopping experience. They are lightweight, easily installable, fast, and reliable. Magento’s PWA studio makes it simple to design and develop amazing web apps which provide customers an app-like mobile and desktop experience and great performance. For business leaders, progressive web apps facilitate the implementation of features such as gamification and a host of innovative ways to stay in touch with and collect feedback from customers.

  2. Automated Recommendations: According to Adobe, customers spend 40% additional time on shopping if experiences are personalized. Magento uses Adobe’s “Sensei” AI implementation to track shopping and browsing behavior, learn from customers and use that information to recommend other products that they’d love, resulting in an increased investment of time and money. With Sensei, Magento offers retail leaders a number of recommendation types based on shoppers, items, contextual popularities, and more to choose from, ensuring there’s always something for customers to check out and come back to the website for

  1. Shopping Assistant: This is a Magento extension that helps retailers guide shoppers through the buying process. Through a series of questions that are put to the customer when they visit, the tool constructs a customer profile and matches possible expectations with the inventory at hand. When it finds items that could be of interest to the customer, it guides them to the relevant sections so the customers do not have to browse and search for themselves. It’s like having a personal shopping assistant that does all the heavy lifting, resulting in greater customer satisfaction.

  1. Live Chat: To enable easy communication and clear doubts while shopping, Magento allows for the integration of live chat features that can take a lot of overheads off your customer service team. Ensure that all the essential questions are covered, add a little personality to your virtual helper, and have it direct customers to the right contacts in case of more advanced issues.

  1. Wide Compatibility: Magento’s compatibility with a wide range of languages and currencies makes it easy for you to make your customers feel at home irrespective of where they are from. Flexible payment options, including major payment gateways like Visa / Master cards, internet banking, Google Pay, PayPal, Amazon, and others further enhance ease of use and contributes to customer satisfaction.

  1. Analytics and Insights: In this day and age, in the quest for establishing personal connections, the company that fails to collect and closely analyze customer data for actionable insights, will eventually fall behind. Magento’s analytics and reporting provide valuable information about every visitor and buyer, which go a long way in helping retail strategists come up with offer design, campaigns, recommendations, and outreach plans for individuals and segments of shoppers.

The sheer versatility of Magento presents a great option for business leaders to quickly transition to an online model and scale for high performance. However, the right go-to-market strategy and a top-notch development team that can build fast, yet robust, can make all the difference between success and failure. Hiring the right talent and end-to-end strategy and execution takes time, but the good news is you don’t have to do it all by yourself. Partnering with the right digital transformation company and leveraging quality Magento services can take a lot of overheads off your plate and save significant costs as well.

Author Bio :

Nilesh Jahagirdar (VP, Marketing and Solutions, [x]cube LABS): Nilesh is the co-founder of [x]cube LABS and over the years, has handled a variety of responsibilities. He loves putting new technology and platforms such as IoT, AI/ML, Magento development, Blockchain, etc to use in innovative ways and tends to obsess over every fine detail in strategy, UI, and UX.

Nilesh’s main focus is to approach problem-solving with an awareness of constraints. While he likes to think long-term, getting short-term executions right so that every detail and a strong foundation for further innovation is in place, is of the utmost importance. He's taken the same approach in [x]cube and with his clients across a variety of initiatives.

 

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