The seamless future of retail is closer than you think

 

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For years, retailers have been talking about providing seamless experiences across digital, phone and in-store customer engagements. Survey after survey shows that customers expect to have a consistent, unified experience with a single, united brand. But delivering those seamless experiences has proven to be extremely difficult.

 

At many retailers, silos remain. Contact centres, digital teams and stores all have different technology infrastructures, business processes and budgets, and integrating them can be a daunting challenge. Often, these teams operate in isolation from each other – or worse, in competition with each other.

 

But it doesn’t have to be this way. In future, this picture will look very different. Even now, small examples of the silos breaking down are all around us.

 

For instance, during the pandemic, store closures led to a massive surge in contact centre volumes. Many retailers instantly recruited experienced, knowledgeable chat agents from their in-store staff to help ease the burden.

 

In the future of retail, teams won’t just combine their existing powers to make customer experiences seamless and friction-free – they’ll be helped by new AI colleagues that can connect all the dots in complex customer journeys.

 

Augment human intelligence

 

One of the most exciting things about the future of AI in retail is just how much of the customer journey we’ll be able to automate. However, there’s still a balance to be struck; we can’t lose sight of the value of the human touch, especially in high-value interactions or emotional situations.

 

Many retailers already use intelligent virtual assistants to automate customer care interactions and shift customers to live agents for sales conversations – they want their best salespeople talking to shoppers. But even after that transfer to a human agent, AI still has a role to play.

 

Today’s AI applications can sit in the background of customer conversations and provide real-time prompts and recommendations for agents based on customer context and history, encyclopaedic product knowledge and best practices from the highest-performing team members.

 

Currently, these AI agent coaching tools learn from phone, chat and messaging conversations. In a world where experiences on those channels blend seamlessly with in-store experiences, AI models can gain an even deeper level of product and customer understanding by learning from customer interactions on the shop floor.

 

Imagine if even your most junior contact centre agents had access to the same level of knowledge and customer service know-how as a veteran of 20 years from a flagship store. Very quickly, the gold standard of customer care and product expertise would become the norm across all your teams. That would have a major impact on customer satisfaction scores and sales figures – and it would be a big step towards delivering the consistent, seamless experiences that customers expect.

 

Stop fraudsters in their tracks

 

In the past, providing frictionless customer experiences would have risked opening the floodgates to fraudsters. Adding security, on the other hand, would have also meant adding friction for customers with the inclusion of passwords, PINs and security questions. With AI-powered biometrics technologies, that’s no longer the case.

 

Already widely used in the financial services and telecommunications sectors, biometric authentication (identifying people based on who they are, rather than knowledge or devices they have) helps companies provide seamless, friction-free experiences while increasing security. It’s a classic win-win: customers don’t have to waste time being interrogated for security details, and fraudsters can’t make use of the customer information they’ve stolen, no matter which channel they try. Although digital is the latest battleground for fraud prevention teams, fraudsters will constantly vary their tactics to find the weakest link, whether that’s stores, the contact centre, a website or a branded app. With biometrics a key weapon in their fraud prevention armoury, teams can detect, prevent and investigate more fraud wherever it appears.

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To learn more about how you can use AI to deliver consistent, intelligent and secure experiences wherever customers engage with your brand, visit nuance.com/omni-channel-customer-engagement/industry/retail.html

 

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By Sebastian Reeve, Director of Intelligent Engagement Market Development, Nuance