What Makes An Excellent Customer Experience ?
Customers And Retailers Weigh In
Benchmark Report
Brian Kilcourse and Steve Rowen, Managing Partners, RSR Research
March 2023
With competition seemingly everywhere and always just a click away, many retailers have identified that offering an excellent customer experience is the way in which they plan to differentiate their
brand.
But what is an “excellent customer experience”? We asked roughly 100 retailers – and 1,000 consumers – to find out. It turns out there are a lot of breaks between their perceptions of what is
– and what should be:
The Authors of this Report discuss the results of their Research
See the video below:
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Key Findings
• Less than 40% of shoppers report that retailers know enough about them to identify the
products they may like, make offers that might be relevant, or perhaps most telling: make
offers based on what they actually buy – not what a retailer may want to sell. Consumers
strongly sense that retailers are still operating from a product-centric point of view.
• Retailers have a very clear view of what they think customers want. They believe their
biggest external challenge – out of a long list of options – is that consumers want more
targeted and personalized offerings. They are only half correct.
• Consumers do want more targeted communications, but only if those communications
provide access to the lowest price possible: 66% of shoppers rated “lowest price” more
important than anything else (a “consistent” experience – even from one store to another
– was rated 2nd most valuable to achieving an excellent shopping experience).
• In good news, shoppers do believe retailers are providing a consistent experience;
55% say their favourite brands perform very well, and another 42% say they do it “somewhat
well”. But according to shoppers, retailers fall short in their abilities to deliver a great loyalty
program, and in their ability to make relevant offers. Fundamentally, retailers are not
perceived as knowing enough about consumers to identify the ways people like to shop.
• Perhaps most importantly, customers believe that even their favourite retailer can provide
the low price they want only half of the time. This puts 50% of their potential purchases
up for grabs.
• As it relates to the technologies that can help them better meet all of these growing shopper
demands, retailers identify solutions that integrate the physical and digital selling
environments – integrated eCommerce, integrated POS, and customer order management as three of the top-five “very important” choices in their customer centric strategy.
Unfortunately, responses show that they are decidedly not yet satisfied with efforts to-date
to implement a customer order management and fulfilment capability.
Based on our data, we also offer several in-depth and pragmatic suggestions on how retailers should proceed.
These recommendations can be found in the Bootstrap Recommendations portion of the report.
Download the FREE full report below. Like every report we write, it is completely free to the entire world.