The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged and changed nearly every part of the retail industry. It has also shined a light on legacy business models that no longer worked or were relevant in today’s new normal. To remain competitive in the cutthroat retail market, companies must focus on the customer experience (CX) they provide. Today, 70% of consumers believe a company is only as good as its customer service. So to meet these customer expectations, many retail companies have undergone — or are planning to undergo — a digital transformation.  

Innovation is a must; the retail industry wants solutions that are quick and easy to deploy, and don’t carry a hefty financial or development burden. Retailers need the ability to meet customers’ wants and needs in the moment. Adopting a digital-first approach allows these organizations to move at the speed of cloud — giving them the flexibility to add on complementary utilities and applications to further enhance their customer experience offerings. 

The Genesys AppFoundry® Marketplace includes several third-party solutions that are designed specifically for the retail industry. Let’s look at five innovative applications for the Genesys Cloud™ platform that you can deploy in minutes — not weeks — to improve CX and differentiate you from your competitors.  

1.  Self-Service and Mobile-First for Shopper-Friendly Visual Engagement  

Your customers know how to use your eCommerce site and make online purchases. But they likely still pick up the phone and call for service or to resolve an issue. And because of supply chain issues many companies are experiencing, your call volume for issue resolution might be higher than usual.  

Inbound IVRs allow you to better identify the callers’ intent, and front-end bots can offer basic information about the customer query based on data lookups. However, these bots might not be sophisticated enough to deliver the tangible help customers need to resolve issues using only self-service options.     

With the Zappix visual self-service solution, you can deploy intelligent digital call-deflection — meeting callers in your IVR and seamlessly transitioning them to an automated visual experience. It connects to a fully personalized self-service portal that delivers the speed and simplicity today’s customers want. Customers get an app-like experience that requires no download or registration to use for tasks like tracking orders, initiating a return, downloading product support documents, filing a claim or service request, and more. This solution has been shown to reduce human-assisted call volume by 40%, which significantly improves customer and employee experiences.   

 2.      Unified Customer View and Retail Case Management 

When it comes to account services, order fulfillments, and payment/refund requests, many retail companies operate a “system of systems” to consistently manage all steps in the process. With these systems in place, it often requires a lot of manual work to bridge missing integrations or make the customer experience more seamless.  

Often, these seemingly simple processes need to cross multiple vendors and multiple systems — forcing service reps to work with incomplete inputs, disparate systems, multiple interfaces and data sets that are difficult to consolidate. Additionally, agents must do all this while still delivering an empathic customer experience that often requires deeper knowledge of the actual customer context.    

The Eccentex solution allows you to build a system that ensures the delivery of all customer commitments in a timely manner, regardless of how many units or departments need to collectively work together. And this system can coordinate all third-party resources — suppliers, logistic partners, resellers — as well as the in-house delivery chain.

Retailers can create a unified desktop that enables omnichannel work orchestration across all units and touchpoints. The unified desktop gives agents access to all the customer context available to personalize experiences. And automating manual tasks makes agents more effective, efficient and engaged.     

3.  Enterprise Knowledge Automation and Orchestration 

It’s likely your retail organization has a lot of knowledge articles, FAQs, product information sites and standard response libraries that agents use to support customers. The problem is that, because information is stored in various systems across your enterprise, it can be difficult to consolidate. There are disparate data structures, different locations and different content formats.  

The Shelf solution is a modern knowledge management platform that leverages the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to harmonize and virtually consolidate these separated knowledge systems. With a source of truth, you can feed this knowledge into your self-service or bot-assisted customer support channels — without copying or moving the original knowledge data into a new system.  

The app uses AI to take intent data from customers and agents and continually improves recommendations over time — no matter the channel. As a source of truth, Shelf MerlinAI learns from each interaction and provides automated insights for busy knowledge managers. Shelf improves the customer experience for self-service channels — and its Agent Assist surfaces answer recommendations for agents on-demand, saving precious time. 

4.      Mobile Shop Assistant and Channel-Switching API 

To elevate your in-store customers’ experience, you can add digital channels within your brick-and-mortar shop. Customers in your store can scan a QR code next to a product they’re interested in, kicking off a live call or chat with a remote sales agent, customer service rep or technical expert — or even a bot.   

Customers get the assistance they need instantly, and you don’t miss a potential sale while the customer is still in the store. As an example: After scanning a QR code on a high-end 4K TV he was interested in, Bob chatted with an agent but claimed he had found a better deal online. The agent can ask Bob to share the competitor’s price so he can assist Bob there and when he’s in the store.  

The customer conversation can seamlessly switch between channels — starting with voice and then transitioning to video, chat or social, as needed, based on the need. With the Vonage Communication Platform, it’s easy to automate communications with customers the way they prefer, helping you to improve your sales performance and customer loyalty. 

5.  AI-Driven Real-Time Intent Analytics and Agent Coaching 

Your agents might be well-trained and ready to deliver the best possible experience to your customers. The Cresta Real-Time Intelligence platform gives retail agents an edge to drive even better customer experience and sales. Cresta provides AI-driven real-time intelligence to deliver intent and assistance to your agents and managers.  

Cresta Agent Assist takes the best practices of top performers and amplifies those across the entire team with real-time, AI-driven assistance and coaching. This includes identifying emotion, hints, smart responses, knowledge base look ups and automatic notetaking. This lets agents focus on customer needs and services, including up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Cresta also provides managers with unprecedented real-time visibility of agent performance and behavior, including alerting as well as enabling real-time online coaching and workflow optimization. These are critical to help work-from-home agents improve their customer interactions.  

Build Your Brand Experience — Your Way 

With the competition waiting at every click and scroll to steal your customers, providing a differentiated service experience is a must. That means building and delivering the brand experience you want for your customers. And, because that experience is as unique as your individual customers, it’s even more important to easily add and deploy innovative technologies. 

Search the Genesys AppFoundry library to see all solutions available to improve your retail customer experience. You can also ask for a free demo or contact your local Genesys Sales Team member for more information.