The golden quarter has begun and it’s time to talk about Christmas, with the Contact Centre leading the way.
Christmas is coming. The autumn school term has begun and already retailers’ shelves are buckling under the weight of Halloween merchandise. Put-upon parents may sigh at the prospect of the three intense months of gift-buying to come. But for retailers, it signals the start of the busiest shopping period of the year. Those with an eye on growth will be focused on several key goals: boosting employee productivity and maximising sales during this golden quarter, but also collecting and analysing data to better serve customers in the year ahead.
This is where the Contact Centre comes into its own. As the hub of customer service operations, it is a critical source of information on agent productivity and customer sentiment. But it’s also where technology deployments can be most effective in streamlining customer journeys at a time of peak demand.
Time to buy
Retailers will be hoping to avoid a repeat of last year. Thanks partly to the lingering effects of a cost-of-living crisis, high interest rates and inflation, the sector recorded its worst December performance since at least 2017. According to one analysis from accounting giant BDO, 2023 was only the third year on record with negative in-store sales in each month of the golden quarter. Separate data from KPMG reveals online sales were down -1% year-on-year in December.
All of which makes the coming festive shopping period even more important. Retailers will want to leave nothing to chance by hiring enough staff, optimising their marketing campaigns and ensuring that IT infrastructure can meet peaks in demand. But they ignore the Contact Centre at their peril. Agents must also be armed with the right tools to maximise productivity and ensure customers get the support they need on their purchasing journeys.
Getting operations golden quarter-ready
Today’s consumers want more than a transactional relationship with their retailers. They value the shopping experience just as much as the products they end up buying. To drive sales in this new landscape, retailers can harness the power of platforms like IPI ElasticCX CCaaS, and our consulting expertise, which offer:
- Omnichannel capabilities so customers can contact your agents via their preferred channel (telephone, web chat, email etc)
- Integrated knowledge management and Agent Assist technology which surfaces real-time information to agents to help them better solve customer pain points
- Self-service tools and automated capabilities like caller ID&V which free up more agents up to handle complex customer queries
- Self-service chatbots programmed to upsell and cross-sell to customers
- Workforce management capabilities to ensure you have the right staffing levels at all times
- Performance management tools that use gamification techniques to increase agent motivation, engagement and productivity, even with a hybrid workforce
- A single platform that can provide a 360-degree view of each customer, and their journey from initial browsing to final purchase – to optimise sales and marketing efforts
Unlocking a treasure trove of data
All of the above might help with the immediate task of maximising golden quarter sales. But the period should also be viewed with a longer-term ambition of understanding more about your customers. Footfall across UK retail locations rose by 6% from November to December 2023, so the chances are that Contact Centres will also see customer interactions spike during the quarter. This is a huge opportunity, as long as you have the right analytics tools to make sense of the resulting data deluge.
This is where speech and text analytics can play a major role, enabling you to produce actionable insight from potentially thousands of hours of call recordings and reams of written communications. Analysing this kind of historic data can surface insight to design more personalised shopping experiences for your customers and improve first-time call resolution. It can identify gaps in the customer journey, potential demand for new Contact Centre channels, and areas for omnichannel improvements. It can also help you analyse agent performance and identify areas for employee and organisational enhancements.
The challenge is that for many retailers, this data is locked away in various silos. A single platform like IPI ElasticCX CCaaS ensures organisations benefit from consistent, actionable insight across the organisation, providing a holistic view of each customer and agent.
Data-driven insight like this is a potential goldmine for retailers. And it’s not just for Christmas. It can add value all the year round.
