In a world where digital has become the norm, customers now expect the same ease, convenience, and consistency offered by eCommerce in all aspects of retail. Moreover, they expect it to be seamlessly integrated at every stage of their customer journey. Consequently, retailers must work harder than ever to provide their customers with a frictionless experience. Today, more businesses are investing in a clear customer engagement solution to help them meet soaring customer demands.
For many retailers, this is no new phenomenon. Retail destinations across the globe have been rewarding their loyal customers for many years. However, like anything in retail, your customer engagement solution must be dynamic and flexible enough to adapt to changes in the market. As new retail trends and technologies emerge, your platform must be able to evolve with you.
With this said, 87% of businesses say they feel loyal to their current customer engagement provider. However, as retail constantly changes, it can be challenging to know when to upgrade your existing engagement platform. Many businesses don’t even realize they are being held back by outdated software and inefficient processes. That is why we have curated a list of key signs that it might be time to upgrade your legacy system.
Lack of Integration Possibilities
If your current legacy system consists of outdated software or bulky hardware, it can make your customer engagement solution difficult to manage and, more importantly – challenging to optimize! In today’s retail market, cloud-based POS systems are undergoing a rapid digital transformation.
Despite this, research shows that most businesses are hesitant to upgrade their current solution. Studies suggest that 56% of retailers fear complex implementation and onboarding processes, resulting in slower deployment. However, research has proven that customer engagement solutions that include loyalty programs provide better functionality, consistency, and overall results. Businesses that invest in updated engagement solutions can increase their overall profitability by 25-125% while simultaneously reducing their churn rate by 5%.
Your customer engagement solution must be able to grow with you and adapt to changes in the market. A considerable weakness of a legacy system is that most require you to invest time and resources into manual point-to-point integrations. If your current engagement system cannot integrate easily, it affects your ability to innovate and build new technologies. Additionally, research proves that customer loyalty reduces when brands fail to innovate, which can significantly stunt your business growth. A study found that 74% of respondents believe failure to adopt emerging commerce solutions will negatively impact businesses.
A customer loyalty platform should offer endless integration possibilities and open APIs, giving you the flexibility to integrate with emerging technologies and continue innovating. Therefore, upgrading your customer engagement solution allows you to access everything you need to scale your business in one easy-to-use platform.
Not to mention that a good customer engagement provider offers industry expertise and data support throughout implementation. In addition, your staff should be provided with training materials to make the onboarding process as fast and as frictionless as possible.
More benefits your customer engagement platform should include to ensure your new system meets your needs:
- Integrate all engagement channels into one secure platform.
- Managing and maintaining data from multiple sources (such as social media, eCommerce, and physical stores)
- Build customer relationships using personalized communication tools
- Leverage new engagement features through mobile app integration giving your customers the best omnichannel experience possible.
- Avoid paying for costly additional software
- Gain ongoing support from your provider for ease of mind
Limited Engagement Tools
If your system does not provide you with the latest customer engagement tools, it’s probably time to change! Customer engagement tools are a powerful way to help you boost sales, reduce churn and increase customer satisfaction. Upgrading your solution gives you access to various innovative technologies designed to improve your customer experience. These can include features such as:
- In-app gamification
- Personalization
- Real-time communication
- Location monitoring
- Card-linking
- Receipt scanning
These kinds of engagement tools are designed to make your customer journey simpler and more convenient. A study found that 80% of customers say they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers a personalized experience. Moreover, 87% of Americans say they will gladly sacrifice some of their data privacy in exchange for an excellent customer experience or customized reward. At the same time, engagement tools allow you to access valuable customer data. They also give you the tools to utilize that data to personalize your interactions with customers at every stage of their retail journey.
They remove friction for both the customer and the retailer by allowing them to get close to their customers. Engagement tools can help retailers understand and influence their customer’s behaviors while creating positive user experiences to boost customer loyalty. Studies show that 71% of consumers who are members of loyalty programs say that their membership is a meaningful part of their relationship with the brand. These statistics show how powerful engagement tools can be for connecting with the omnichannel customer.
Insufficient Reporting
The next challenge that many retailers face is insufficient reporting. Either their current customer engagement solution cannot collect sufficient levels of data or transfer data from multiple sources, making it extremely difficult to extract actionable insights from the data.
A customer engagement platform like Coniq’s can collect data from multiple sources and combine the data into one automated platform. Giving you access to personalized analytics dashboards and specialized reporting tools to help you get the most out of your customer data!
Questions your engagement program should provide to arm your business with the most powerful business insights:
- Where your customers shop?
- When do your customers shop?
- How often are they shopping?
- What are they buying?
- How much they spend? – per transaction and per visit
The best part? The dashboards track real-time data giving you the most dynamic and accurate view of your customer behavior. Understand and influence your shoppers at exactly the right time while staying up to date with the latest retail trends! What’s not to love?
Cost Efficiency
Research suggests that cost is a business’s primary concern when deciding whether to switch providers. They may be asking themselves, is it worth it?
Investing your budget into upgrading your existing solution has many competitive advantages. Research shows that customer acquisition costs up to 7x more than customer retention, making engagement solutions extremely cost-effective.
A loyal customer is said to make purchases 90% more frequently than a non-loyal customer and spend, on average, 67% more. Equally, studies have shown that when a business achieves a 7% increase in brand loyalty, the lifetime value of each customer can rise by 85%. In addition, some solutions, like Coniq’s digital platform, enable retail destinations to select ‘out-of-the-box’ tools and use them to build personalized engagement programs at a ready-made cost. This type of customer engagement solution is entirely customizable and has the flexibility to modify core and ancillary functionalities with ease, empowering your business with SaaS innovation to boost your customer engagement strategy.
Is It Time to Upgrade My Engagement Solution?
The bottom line – businesses must invest in a future-proof customer engagement solution to meet rising customer expectations and keep up with the increasing level of competition.
The future of customer loyalty relies on multi-channel, data-driven engagement that builds upon your customer preferences. This includes comprehensive experience-driven engagement that guides shoppers through personalized customer journeys. Thus, upgrading your legacy system to a customized solution is the best way to ensure that your engagement platform stays relevant while providing customers with innovative omnichannel features and experiences.
