RingCentral and Retail TouchPoints Unveil New Research White Paper

Retailers have invested seemingly endless time and money into transitioning to omnichannel business model, seeking to break down the silos that separate the channels they use to deliver a consistent brand message. The goal is to create a seamless, personalised shopping experience across channels, so consumers can effortlessly transition across mobile, social, store, and web.

But many have overlooked one key component of omnichannel strategy: communications. Across the retail landscape, ageing PBX systems languish in back rooms and utility closets, with different PBX brands and models across countries, offices, warehouses, and even store to store. This degrades the brand experience due to cumbersome, slow response times and incompatibility across systems. Many use outdated contact centre solutions that are incapable of enabling the seamless movement of customer service encounters across channels such as phone, chat, email, text, and social media.

Ageing and disparate communications systems also limit collaboration and communications internally and with partners, drive up system management and maintenance costs, and cause downtime and scrambling whenever one system component fails.

Retailers are just beginning to awaken to the important connection between seamless communications and omnichannel approach to retail.

If communication isn’t optimised throughout the supply chain, retailers can’t respond quickly to demanding customers in a changing environment. Click To Tweet

To learn more, RingCentral recently commissioned Retail TouchPoints to survey a cross-section of retailers on the current state of their customer experience initiatives and their approach to communications.

Based on this survey, the findings outline the correlation between communications and customer experience. Many retailers face widespread challenges in keeping up with rising consumer expectations:

• 42% struggle to provide fast response to customers’ enquiries
• 84% use email to communicate with customers

On the surface, communications systems and customer experience seem like two very separate things. However, if communication isn’t optimised throughout the supply chain, retailers can’t respond quickly to demanding customers in a changing environment.

The technology is here today with the cloud, and it is creating unprecedented opportunities for experience innovation. Find out how modern and flexible cloud unified communications and contact centre solutions help top UK retailers speed up and optimise the supply chain, manage multiple locations, and bridge the gap in their customer experience roadmap.