Customer Service in
the Retail and Consumer Goods Industry
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Challenges
The retail and consumer goods industry is undergoing a significant transformation driven by the widespread adoption and expansion of digital channels and evolving customer expectations. In today’s competitive commercial landscape, customer retention is more important than ever. Various challenges arise in delivering efficient customer service to ensure customer retention.
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Multi-channel and omnichannel customer support: Customers interact with retailers through various channels, including physical stores, websites, mobile apps, social media, chatbots and call centres. Providing a consistent and seamless customer experience across different channels is a challenge.
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Increasing customer expectations: Customers expect personalised interactions, convenience, fast response times, and seamless experiences across channels. Meeting and exceeding these expectations can be tough for retailers, particularly as customer demands continue to evolve.
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Personalisation at scale: Personalisation is a key driver of customer satisfaction and loyalty. However, achieving personalised experiences across digital channels can be complex, especially as customer bases expand. Striking the right balance between personalisation and privacy is also crucial.
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Managing peak periods: Retailers often face peak periods, such as holiday seasons and sales events, where customer inquiries surge. Retailers need to have adequate staffing, robust systems, and streamlined processes to handle the increased volume effectively.
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Staff training and turnover: The retail industry often experiences high turnover rates among customer service staff. Efficient resourcing, continuously training new hires, and ensuring consistent knowledge across the team can be difficult.
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The Salesforce Q1 Shopping Index states that “customer service is your weakest link”. Their retail data research shows that
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“80% of consumers will switch brands after three bad experiences. --- Consumers want quick, friendly, and consistent responses, and, more than ever, they are choosing digital engagement like live chat services to get the job done.”
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Businesses need to adopt new technologies and develop their internal processes to overcome these challenges in order to improve their overall customer satisfaction and ensure customer retention.
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The Fluentic app makes for a better and faster customer support experience, strengthening your long-term relationship with your customers. Furthermore, it helps streamline internal processes, leading to increased efficiency and cost savings.
Importance of Multilingual Customer Service
In a crowded retail market, differentiation is vital. By providing multilingual customer service, retailers can stand out from their competitors and position themselves as inclusive and customer-focused organisations.
As retailers expand into new markets or experience increased demand from different language segments, ensuring scalable and flexible multilingual customer service becomes crucial.
Retailers must be able to adapt their language support capabilities to accommodate changing customer needs, market dynamics, and business growth. This requires scalable infrastructure, agile processes, and the ability to quickly recruit and train new staff when necessary.
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Finding and maintaining a diverse team of multilingual customer service representatives can be problematic. Recruiting staff with fluency in specific languages, especially less common ones, typically requires additional effort and resources.
Fluentic’s AI-powered translation solution for customer service automation helps tackle many of the common difficulties in the retail industry. By unlocking unlimited multilingual customer service with Fluentic, retailers can build trust, enhance customer satisfaction, and expand their customer base by appealing to diverse language demographics – with no more than their existing customer service team.
Benefits
Fluentic’s AI-powered translation solution for multilingual customer service helps address many of the common challenges in the retail industry. Here are some of the benefits our clients have experienced since implementing the Fluentic app as part of their customer service operations.
Cost savings
By removing the language barriers, customer support operations can be handled more cost-efficiently from a centralised location, enabling 24/7 customer service.
Improved customer experience
When customers can easily communicate and receive assistance in their own language, it fosters trust, satisfaction, and a positive perception of the retailer. Positive experiences lead to better customer retention, brand loyalty, and positive word-of-mouth recommendations.
Low agent downtime
Any customer support agent can serve any customer and handle many cases in different languages simultaneously. This means low downtime, which leads to improved efficiency and time management.
Increased sales and revenue
By providing support in customers' native languages, retailers can effectively influence purchase decisions, cross-sell or upsell products, and meet customer needs more effectively. This can result in increased conversion rates, larger order values, and ultimately, improved profitability.
Quicker response times
Queuing times are shorter and retail companies can quickly react to sudden peaks in customer inquiries. Customers get answers to their questions faster, leading to better customer satisfaction.
Expanded customer reach
Offering multilingual customer service enables retailers to tap into new markets, attract a diverse customer base, and expand their reach beyond their local or domestic audience.
Automating multilingual customer support with Fluentic offers significant benefits to retailers, solving language-related problems and enhancing customer service operations.
By expanding and automating their multilingual customer service abilities with the Fluentic app, retailers can build strong relationships with customers, promote inclusivity, and drive business growth.
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Want to hear more about how Fluentic can benefit your business?
Contact us for references from the retail industry and to discuss your specific needs.
