Go Beyond Deals to Win Back-to-School Share of Wallet Through CX

There’s a lot at stake for a variety of retailers this back-to-school season with total spending projected to reach $38.8 billion and shoppers planning to allocate their spend across e-commerce (57 percent), department stores (50 percent), discount stores (47 percent), clothing stores (42 percent), and electronics stores (23 percent), according to the National Retail Federation (NRF).

With spending underway, the competition to capture customers’ attention is fierce. While many are leaning into high-profile sales events, investing in the customer experience (CX) is a powerful alternative. After all, customers are willing to pay a premium for good experiences, or worse, walk away from brands they love after bad experiences.

Here are effective strategies retailers can use to maximize the customer experience, driving value for consumers and business for retailers without eroding profit margins.

3 Ways to Improve Experiences and Fuel Loyalty and Revenue This Back-to-School Season

1. Leverage learnings from previous seasons, other annual shopping events, and real-time customer feedback.

Experience is one of the biggest drivers of loyalty. To grow it, companies must figure out what adds value for customers — i.e., identifying the most important and highest priority factors, whether that’s better customer service or a wider product assortment — and double down on offering those.

Retailers don’t have to look far for insights. They can collect real-time feedback from online surveys embedded in their websites, apps, live-chat interactions and emails. They can also analyze and uncover trends from social media, online reviews and customer service interactions.

What consumers define as a great customer experience tends to remain consistent year-over-year. Therefore, data from past back-to-school seasons and other annual shopping events like Black Friday can be used to better anticipate needs.

Retailers should look at how making changes — e.g., increasing inventory or personnel — have influenced or are currently shaping customer service scores, NPS, and revenue.

2. Optimize for customer convenience.

When consumers have their pick of stores to choose from, brands need to make things effortless. That means putting back-to-school inventory front and center in person and having enough employees to keep things organized and restocked.

Just as empty or messy shelves can turn brick-and-mortar shoppers away, online category pages and search results filled with out-of-stock items can cause friction for digital users. Consider removing out-of-stocks altogether, displaying substitutes instead, and keeping live chat appropriately staffed to address issues that arise.

3. Ensure connected experiences.

Most major retailers with both an online and brick-and-mortar presence have already invested in ensuring customers can seamlessly move back and forth between browsing and purchasing online to picking up orders and handling returns in-store. The next frontier is about delivering a consistent, optimized omnichannel experience.

Until recently, the customer experience of physical stores has been analog by default. Increasingly, retailers are building apps that act as a copilot for in-person shopping, enabling customers to navigate more efficiently, request customer service on-demand, complete self-checkout without waiting in line, and more.

Final Thoughts

The consequences of poor customer experiences this back-to-school season (and beyond) can be measured by customers coming back less often and spending less money when they do. That’s something no retailer wants to happen. Brands can intervene (and even head off potential issues in the future) by resolving issues for individuals and the aggregate.

Better serving the individual is critical, as improving the experience for just one person can turn them from a detractor into a promoter who shops more often and spends more money.

By pinpointing systemic underlying issues that are impacting the many during this busy shopping period, implementing data-driven actions to solve these challenges, and letting customers know their concerns have been heard, brands have the potential to transform groups of detractors into promoters and drive business growth, not only from increased loyalty but by earning more referrals from positive word-of-mouth.

Mike Debnar is vice president, retail executive advisor at Medallia, an experience management software platform.