Anywhere CX for Omnichannel Retail
If there’s one thing that the rising smartphone usage and internet connectivity have done for customers — it is to make them much more aware. With users getting access to multiple sources of information, their choices & spending patterns are changing accordingly. This shift in behavior has led retail brands to explore more digital-first channels of engagement with users, be it with online stores / offline stores / social media or e-commerce platforms. Moreover, with the COVID-19 pandemic pushing for a socially distanced world, digital solutions have transformed consumer behavior unprecedentedly. As brands leverage emerging technologies to cater to the needs of the post-pandemic consumer. Attracting the users is turning out to be a challenge for omnichannel retail brands, considering the competition and operational costs. Hence, it is not surprising to see businesses targeting retail consumers across channels through strategies that streamline customer service and personalize experience at every touchpoint.
The journey from being an e-commerce brand to being an omnichannel retail leader and how we delight our customers across traditional and digital channels?
We started off as a pure-play online player, and as we continued to do studies, two patterns started to emerge:
- Need for a customer to get the eye-checkup done
- Ability to try the glasses and get the sense of size & feel of the product.
That’s when we apart from working on our technological solutions built through augmented reality and machine learning-based sizing tools, we also experimented by opening stores. And from the get-go, ever since we have opened the stores from this perspective, our approach has been consumer-backward. To put this in action, we build products & workflows that allow customers to seamlessly transition between online & offline when interacting with our agents, at stores or their homes. While trying to develop products in this fashion, we try to make the technology more & more invisible, so when a store team member welcomes a consumer in a store, he’s able to easily access the customer profile with their permission to get an understanding of their previous orders & shortlists and effectively suggest glasses based your liking. Similarly, post-sales if a customer raises a query on social media or contacts us at stores we are immediately able to resolve the query. This helps us build a consistent lenskart experience no matter how they engage with us.
From offering shopping assistance to answering queries on order status, lenskart uses WhatsApp as a toll-free channel for customers. How do such media work as sales channels for high-value products?
WhatsApp is a very powerful medium, and there are two key things that it brings to the table for us:
- It is ubiquitous as it allows us to continue communicating with the customer even when they have left the application. As an example, when a customer visits our app and browses a few glasses but isn’t able to complete the purchase within five days; we are able to reach out and ask whether they would like an eye-checkup at our store or their homes that will help them complete the purchase and it allows us to address customer’s post-sales queries.
- Another reason is, WhatsApp has a user interface that people are very used to now and are comfortable sharing images to their friends and family. In our case, during pre-sales, a customer comfortable shared an image of the type of eye frames they would like, and on the back-end, we are able to plugin our visually similar recommendation engine which allows the sales agent to give very relevant suggestions to the customer and that helps in closing the purchase quickly.
For high-touch retailers, customer retention & loyalty are key focus areas to succeed in such a crowded market. How does one elevate customer experience to a growth function from servicing that impacts the metrics beyond retention?
For us, it’s evident that no business can be successful without customer loyalty leading to high repeat purchases. Burning money to acquire new customers and lose them due to poor service is a broken process from our perspective. Therefore, we continue to take regular feedbacks through NPS across various consumer touchpoints, and we have a transparent model correlating to the business of our stores, a repeat of customers across different channels, and the lifetime value of the consumers. So we are very quickly able to predict how much change in NPS can drive meaningful results for the business. And since we have multiple touchpoints with the consumers we are constantly able to compare them and improve these models.
NPS drives 60%+ projects that we choose to pick in every quarter and is the single & most common metric across various teams, be it technology, online revenue, store teams, merchandising & plant operations.
As fashion customers get more anxious about the purchase, they look for personalized attention and speedy responses. How do lenskart support teams scale this degree of personalization in customer service?
For customer service, we make it easy for them to reach out to us via emails, WhatsApp, or social media. At the backend, we use Freshworks to tie all these tickets into common threads where a resolution is given. Since we are an omnichannel business, this thread is visible to all relevant stakeholders such as stores, support agents or relevant departments such as delivery or the merchandising teams. This helps us provide personalized experiences to consumers no matter where they go, as all the information is assimilated at a single place to allow us to give a quick response.
You can watch the full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIvtGlwbkzs
Lenskart is currently hiring for multiple roles in our tech centers at Hyderabad, Bangalore & NCR. In case you find yourself to be a fit and are eager to join us on this exciting growth journey. Please apply from the links below:
1) Frontend Developers: https://lnkd.in/gCfeYyE
2) JAVA Developers: https://lnkd.in/gBevGZz
3) Product Managers: https://lnkd.in/g8-DMtr
