Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

The importance of the retail customer experience has increased multifold over the pandemic, even at a time when a record number of retailers have had to shut down their physical stores. But this period has also set apart the cream of retail stores from their contemporaries, through their agility to provide a seamless retail customer experience online – finding ways to stay relevant even with a decrease in footfall, and adapting their existing strategy to be digital-first.

Whether your marketing goals are lofty and far-reaching or finite and quick to achieve, the most important element they provide is opportunity and momentum for improvement. Things are now shifting more to the online space, particularly due to the past year, where many industries had to pivot from a primarily offline focus into unfamiliar territory online. In response, companies’ approach to customer service has become a quickly evolving landscape, and team members must stay adaptable.

The customer experience market was valued at $6.5 billion in 2019 and is expected to experience a 17.7%¹ compound annual growth rate each year until 2027. With happy customers being the lifeblood of all businesses and the value of customer experience, it’s no surprise that 45.9%² of businesses rate customer experience as their most important priority over the next five years.

In 2020, close to 306.4 billion emails were exchanged each day, and this number is expected to shoot up to over 361.6 billion daily emails in 2024.1 With so many emails being sent and received on a daily basis, email management is critical for organizations to function smoothly. Especially for customer-facing teams that deal with customer emails, day in and day out.

Freshworks is a multi-product SaaS company offering numerous products in the customer experience, ITSM and CRM space, including Freshdesk, Freshservice, Freshworks CRM and more products you can find on our website. As you might imagine, there are various capabilities like notifications and emails that each of these products must offer, instances where the technology involved is deep in terms of complexity. We would benefit as an engineering organization by solving them exactly once.

In the business world, the necessity of successful digitization is becoming unavoidable, and there may be no area in which digital transformation is as important as customer support. Consumers have questions and problems, and they want them addressed immediately and on their own schedules. As a result, lots of companies are pouring resources into their digital transformation projects. Unfortunately, those efforts often fail due to a lack of planning or lack of employee buy-in.

Customer retention is a crucial part of any business’s operations. You’ve heard it all before – it’s much easier to get an existing customer to buy from you again than it is to win new customers. Your chance of selling to an existing customer is between 60–70%, compared to 5–20% for a new customer. Do you spend time marketing to your current customers and drawing them back into your sales funnel?

A decade ago, where employees were concerned, the word ‘remote’ was used to describe workers in far-off offices. Today, it is the new cool. As a result of technological advancements and collaboration tools, working remotely now represents a more productive option for companies across different niches. According to a Gallup Poll, about 43% of gainfully employed Americans work remotely. With the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic, you can expect this number to go up.

Last week, we were privileged to have some incredible industry experts from Retail Week, PayPal, Shopify, Parcelhub and Medallia discussing the most pressing matters in retail at an event we called Let’s Talk Shop – Your retail CX roadmap for 2021. We’ve put together this piece so you know what happened and what to take away.

You do your best to provide outstanding customer service. You work hard, follow best practices, and go the extra mile to try and deliver a positive customer service experience. But how do you know if it’s working? To really understand what your customers think about your company, you’ll have to ask them. That’s where customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys come in. Customer satisfaction surveys are a great way to find out how you’re doing — and how you can do even better.