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Equally challenging: employees standing around because
the store is in its “quiet cycle” during
the day. The first situation affects the customer experience
and is the foremost concern of today’s retailers.
The second affects the bottom line and is what retailers
worry about when they aren’t worrying about the
customer experience.
The two issues facing major
retailers today are improving the customer experience
and controlling or cutting costs. These
two issues are difficult to balance, as improving the
customer experience usually means adding more staff
to assist customers. Labor is the biggest cost to a
retailer. Customer satisfaction and the successful sale
are the lifeblood of the retailer.
Also impacting the retail sector today:
- Employee productivity and increasing efficiency
- The move to self-service
- Increasingly tech-savvy customers
As companies attempt to drive profitability by reducing
headcount or by forcing existing employees to serve
more customers in the same amount of time, the overall
level of service almost always drops. At the same time
in today’s competitive business environment, customers
have come to expect right-here, right-now attention
to their needs. Anything less may result in the costly
loss of that customer.
Experticity’s solution
is easy to understand: Remote customer service
agents interact with customers via interactive streaming
video, providing just-in-time personalized service as
if the service agent were physically present at the
retail location. Live agents can be matched to a customer’s
inquiry by expertise or even by language spoken, providing
informed, multilingual customer service. And the live
agents have access to whatever data they may need to
serve the customer, such as backend inventory systems,
product information direct from the manufacturer, and
Internet search capability – all of which can
be pushed to the customer’s screen.
Experticity's solution is fully scalable. A single
store can leverage two or three live agents across the
entire store, providing instant and on-demand help to
customers at any number of service kiosks located throughout
the store. A retail chain can further leverage these
support agents across many stores, so peak time in one
store can be covered by additional agents in another.
With one agent able to be in many locations at one time
providing on-demand live service and support to customers
in the retail environment, the ROI on the Experticity
system is easily calculated.
A retailer that deploys Experticity’s
solution can achieve:
| Improved customer satisfaction from personalized, one-on-one attention, without
the search or the wait. |
| Signficant cost savings through optimizing labor utilization and increasing
staffing flexibility. Savings to the bottom line
can be significant and the ROI can be achieved in
as little as six months. |
| Increased revenue by showing the customer competitive offers on the
Internet and closing the deal, and the ability to
up-sell and cross-sell customers because agents
have access to multiple information sources. |
The Experticity System:
| Puts a sales person
exactly where needed and when needed with
the right expertise. |
| Provides the customer
with a focused one-on-one interaction. The
sales person has no other distractions, has access
to massive amounts of information and can stay with
the customer throughout the store, if the customer
wishes. |
| Distributes labor efficiently. When Store A is quiet, agents can support
customers in Store B. Atlanta or Milwaukee-based
employees can serve customers in Los Angeles one
minute and Miami the next, pushing out information
screens that provide a rich, interactive customer
experience. |
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