- March 25, 2015
- Posted by: admin
- Category: Blog
Time flies. Unfortunately, the wing-less resolutions fail to rise high – let alone touching the clouds, reaching the skies and beyond those dreams. I say this because it’s almost the end of Q1 and the New Year’s Resolutions don’t seem to be realizing into realities. We sure talked about integrating the verticals to provide that wholesome and absolutely connected Customer eXperience, but facts are – verticals need to be independently stable first. Verticals need to up their game, speed up their actions and work harder and consistently to provide that customer experience alone at the awesome level, and then only will the integration create the beautiful journey for the customer.
Remember Sarah and John? Well, they were anticipating an extraordinary life in their new home in the KnowVille Neighborhood, but little did they know that not many organizations pay heed to CX like they should. Interested in their story? Well, get yourself in the shopping mood because the couple just planned for a vacation.
One fine day, John and Sarah decided to go shopping. Because they had a long time of ‘to-do items’ and a longer list of ‘stuff required’, they knew they had to flee through the shopping without wasting any time. Well, God and retailers have plans of their own. So here’s a few surprises that they had (I’d like to call them surprises more than experiences because they never though the situation was this bad, and neither will you):
- Some of the shops, that had the items that they wanted, were closed for maintenance
- Others that were open were great up until the point of payment- where they didn’t accept credit cards or their system was down/ not responding/ don’t care!
- Some shops had the item, but not the size/color
- And then there was a shop where they found just what they wanted but had a few questions regarding it. Seems like a mistake on their part, that they decided to talk to a sales representative. Not having found the salesperson had agitated them enough, when they saw a sign that read ‘For further assistance, contact Customer Service’. How convenient. Actually not, because they couldn’t take the item to that location, which was on another floor. Anyhow, they had to wait a while to get to the front of the line where they had to explain their problem, describe the item, ask the questions, and then get the answers. Almost tempted them to forget the item and leave – if only they didn’t like it so much.
It was amazing to see such inconvenience at play – and that too for retail brands. It must seem unlikely to you that this might have happened at a retail store because all that sounds like a stretch, but it did. Albeit, it wasn’t at the physical store. What John and Sarah experienced throughout their shopping spree was a mobile experience gone bad and also worse.
A mobile moment that was interrupted – the dreadful disconnect – when they had to leave their shopping app to call customer service. Or they had to go through the complete shopping only to find out that the e-commerce part of the site wasn’t fixed.
Or thankfully, the entire site was out for maintenance and didn’t allow them to get in the mood in the first place.
No retailer would ever dream of providing such a poor and fractured shopping experience. Unless, it’s in a mobile app – which is too bad because the world is moving towards everything IoT and all out on smart phones and tablets – anything on the go!
CX is essentially a complete set – with subsets of UX and Customer Service. Other sets that need to merge as well are the customer-centricity and employee-centricity to get the best results. Now, CX covers the customer’s perceived experience from beginning to end, at all touch points within a company. UX deals mainly with digital touch points, such as web and mobile user interface, and is a subset of CX. Customer service is just one part of the entire shopping experience, which also puts it in the subset category.
Now this isn’t easily and correctly understood by the masses. Sadly, many retailers don’t take it that seriously – and only time will teach them a harsh lesson. Time flies, and these retailers will be left behind with dust – oh, and resolutions in their diaries.
Would you like to bounce off ideas on your retail customer experience? Please feel free to reach out and we’ll be happy to do that:
[contact-form-7 404 "Not Found"]About Ephlux
Ephlux is an agile consulting and technology services company that provides application, integration and marketing services that enhance customer experience.
Our play is to work with CX, marketing and IT teams to help them orchestrate customer-centric processes around people, services, channels and devices both on-prem and on the enterprise cloud and build touch-points including mobile, web, kiosk and social apps across the customer journey.
Along with mobile, web and social apps, we provide Oracle CX Cloud apps (Oracle Sales Cloud, Oracle Marketing Cloud, Oracle Service Cloud), Oracle PaaS (ADF, MAF, SOA), Adobe Marketing Cloud (Adobe CQ5 | Experience Manager), E-Business Suite, JD Edwards Business Services, JBoss ESB, WSO2 and enterprise integration services.
We are Oracle gold partner specialized on Oracle CX Cloud app suite and are also partners with Adobe for their Adobe CQ5 (Experience Manager) / Marketing Cloud.
We have been working in the US, UK and KSA markets with clients including Disney, IKEA, PHILIPS, Johnson & Johnson, Gibson Guitars along with some very disruptive start-ups.
