Fang Cheng is the CEO of Linc Global, a customer experience automation platform delivering automated experiences at scale.
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With no end to the coronavirus pandemic insight, the annual flu season about to kick off and even major players such as Walmart and Target opting to stay closed on Thanksgiving Day, it’s shaping up to be a holiday season unlike any other for retailers.
Brands can’t depend on the traditional massive influx of foot traffic to bolster their bottom lines. That doesn’t mean deal hunters won’t be online in full force looking to score Black Friday and Cyber Monday bargains. Retailers need to be ready to scale their businesses for a different kind of holiday shopping season.
Embrace An E-Commerce-First Mentality
More than ever, your e-commerce infrastructure should be bulletproof, and online orders should be the centerpiece of your holiday sales strategy. Embracing an e-commerce-first mentality begins with mapping the typical customer journey across all the various touch points your customers are exposed to when interacting with your brand. Then, you can align the behaviors you expect at these touch points – searching new products on your website, clicking on a digital ad, initiating a return, etc. – with the ways in which your e-commerce strategy and technology can better enable them. This may look like surfacing products based on past browsing, providing personalized landing pages or automating the return process to create a seamless path to purchase for your shoppers.
Make Returns Hassle-Free
Retailers should expect a higher volume of returns than usual this holiday season as shoppers make purchases online that they would previously have bought in person, but without the benefit of trying on items or a hands-on examination of the product. Your return process needs to be as seamless as possible for the customer.
One way to do that is to ensure constant communication, from return authorization to when the return arrives at the warehouse. You can allow your customers to initiate their returns on your website and collect all of the return data within a streamlined return workflow. You can also provide a printable return label at the end of the process and give an expected processing time. Give customers options on tracking their return via email or text – leveraging the shipper’s own delivery tracking infrastructure as needed – and offer a notification when the return has been received and when the refund has been processed. This closes the loop with the customer and provides peace of mind.
Consider Implementing On-Site Chat
Beyond being a revenue generator and competitive differentiator, live chat is a key piece in successfully scaling to meet customer demand this holiday season. Shoppers are exploring every avenue to reduce the risk of an incorrect purchase. They want answers to their questions upfront and they are less willing to take a chance on a bargain – especially deals on impulse buys – than they were before the pandemic. Web chat driven by AI can allow for engagement before buying and provide answers to questions.
For those not yet ready to scale to live chat in the near term, a smart first step is enhancing your on-site knowledge base and making your website FAQ as robust and visible as possible. This allows customers to find general answers on topics such as refunds, return policies and shipping fees on their own.
Actively Identify Opportunities For Cross-Selling And Upselling
The cognitive strain of trying to adapt our daily lives to an ongoing pandemic shouldn’t be underestimated. One of the key questions retailers need to ask themselves is, “How do we make things easier for our customers?” One way to do that is to take the work out of product discovery for them. Automated customer care platforms can leverage data about consumer purchase history as well as the common purchases of customers of a similar profile to expose customers to personal product recommendations. Building a true single customer view – the driver of cross-selling and upselling opportunities – requires aggregating and automating data from across your organization, but don’t let the scale of that undertaking discourage you. For this season, explore concrete tactics such as abandoned cart email notifications and tried-and-tried remarketing web ads based on previously viewed items.
Make Order Inquiries Easy
Extended shipping times are becoming the new normal as retailers struggle to keep up with increased demand, supply chain disruptions and delays from the shippers themselves. Holiday purchases are highly time-sensitive, so expect your shoppers to have greater anxiety about their order status than usual. This holiday season, real-time cross-device order look-up capabilities should be foundational elements of your CX strategy, allowing stressed-out shoppers to keep tabs on their purchases from the time they leave your warehouse until they land on their doorstep.
Offer Pickup Flexibility
The choice is no longer between standing in a checkout line and standing at your front door looking for the FedEx truck. Even before the pandemic, buy online, pickup in-store (BOPIS) and buy online, ship to store (BOSS) were rapidly growing order fulfillment options, with 90% of retailers looking to implement BOPIS in 2021. Covid-19 has only accelerated consumers’ preference for an order delivery method that meshes the hands-off nature of e-commerce with the speed and convenience of brick-and-mortar buying. One e-commerce-focused company surveyed its customers and found a fivefold increase in BOPIS orders in recent months compared with pre-pandemic numbers. With shoppers looking to reduce their exposure to crowded stores while also retaining the flexibility of picking up purchases on their own schedule, smart retailers are embracing and promoting this hybrid option for the 2020 holiday season. If you offer BOPIS or BOSS options, make sure you’re highlighting this flexibility in your holiday marketing and giving it prominence on your website and within your digital checkout flow.
The Show Will Go On
Despite the temporary uptick in the search volume for the question, “Is Black Friday canceled?” the 2020 holiday shopping season is absolutely still happening. Shoppers eager for a sense of normalcy will still be using the day after Thanksgiving to kick off their holiday buying efforts. For retailers, the challenge is anticipating, planning for and responding to the big shifts in customer behavior that Covid-19 has spawned.
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