There’s no denying that consumers today expect more from the retail experience, and increasingly, that includes their experience with a brand even after a purchase is completed. In fact, 53% of shoppers view the post-purchase period as the most emotional part of any shopping experience.
And beyond consumers’ heightened sensitivity to what happens after they click “buy,” retailers and brands also are recognizing how crucial the post-purchase moment is for their own success.
“There’s something in the DNA of the American psyche — we’re a fast-moving society and we are not conditioned to wait,” said Jerry Sheldon, Analyst at IHL Consulting Group in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “We want information fast, we want our clothing fast, we want our food fast, we want to utilize credit to get things that historically our parents had to save up for. As a society we elevate the value of our time, and because of that, the post-purchase experience is a huge component of customer loyalty, but perhaps the most overlooked.”
However, brands are increasingly recognizing this disconnect and working to rectify it. One of the easiest places to start involves improving your post-purchase communications game.
Check out our free report, “Driving Long-Term Loyalty with Post-Purchase Innovations,” for more on the tools, capabilities and organizational structures you need to win with consumers after they click “buy.”
Delivery Updates Now a Must-Have
Consumers’ post-purchase communications expectations. Source: Narvar
Brands and retailers that have invested in optimizing their post-purchase experience realize that upping your communications game means going beyond basic WISMO (where is my order) capabilities and investing in service, marketing and communication capabilities. The ultimate goal: turning the post-purchase journey into an experience that’s immersive, personalized and valuable for the customer.
“People want — and expect — to know exactly when their packages are going to be delivered,” said Ryan Kelly, VP of Marketing at FedEx in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “When polled, 94% of consumers said they expect brands to tell them when their delivery will be before they even have to ask.”
But all consumers are not created equal; each comes with their own specific communications preferences, so this expectation of transparency and the various vehicles through which it can be achieved creates “a real minefield for brands,” said Nick Kramer, Leader of Applied Solutions at global consulting firm SSA & Company.
To navigate that minefield, Kramer suggests that brands put the control back in the customers’ hands: “Consumers are more savvy with technology than ever before, and that crosses demographics,” he said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “More and more consumers expect to be in control of their communication with brands. Like, for example, being able to open up the Shop app and find out what the status [of a delivery] is.”
The Golden Rule of Post-Purchase: Be Honest
And while consumers do expect most orders to arrive relatively quickly, “shoppers can deal with delays, but they expect brands to keep them in the loop,” said FedEx’s Kelly. In fact, the experts agree, even more important than speed is transparency.
“Let’s be adults and have adult communication,” said Sheldon. “I can handle some disappointment, but don’t disappoint me even further by not being honest. Treating people right really goes a long way.”
This kind of transparency into delivery timeframes is well within the reach of all retailers, not just large chains with more resources. “Shippers have a very clear understanding of when items are going to arrive, and they offer APIs that any retailer can connect to to capture that information,” said Sheldon. “Take Salesforce, for example — they have partnerships with FedEx and Walmart Local delivery. If you’re on the Salesforce platform, you can subscribe to these services, and it gets you fast local delivery through Walmart and pre-negotiated rates through FedEx. So this isn’t just a big boy thing, even if you’re a small mom-and-pop you can subscribe to these services. We have entered an age where you don’t have to be a tier one retailer to offer that level of service.”
Leverage AI to Create a ‘Culture of Visibility’
AI also has the potential to make this process easier on retailers, although Kramer said it’s as much promise as reality at the moment: “The ability to drive heightened personalization toward the ‘segment of one’ concept that we’ve always longed for, where we genuinely treat each customer differently — every brand is trying to experiment with AI to see how it will help create that,” he noted. “It’s all still very nascent though, more failed experiments than successful ones so far.”
Even so, Kramer believes that the kind of responsiveness consumers are demanding — and that companies want to deliver — is possible today by “creating visibility through the data into your performance. Make these decisions data-driven and have a culture of visibility into those data decisions based on facts. That I do think is entirely feasible now. And in fact, it’s an imperative to do this now because AI is thirsty for data. Enterprises that are diving into AI are learning this lesson the hard way, which is that the quality of the AI depends on the volume and quality of the data that you use to train it. The companies that lay that groundwork by becoming data-driven are the ones that will be ahead of the game with AI.”
Sheldon also said that a “modern API, cloud-based order management system [OMS] is so critical,” adding that “there’s so much margin that can be recuperated with an OMS and yet it is probably one of the most underrated tools with regards to customer satisfaction.”
Check out our free report, “Driving Long-Term Loyalty with Post-Purchase Innovations,” for more on the tools, capabilities and organizational structures you need to win with consumers after they click “buy.”
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{URL}https://www.retailtouchpoints.com/topics/customer-experience/how-to-navigate-the-post-purchase-communication-minefield{/URL}
{Author}Nicole Silberstein{/Author}
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{Keywords}AI & Machine Learning,Customer Experience,Digital Commerce,E-commerce Experience,Fulfillment & Last Mile,Customer loyalty,delivery notifications,Featured,narvar,post-purchase communications,post-purchase experience,WISMO{/Keywords}
{Source}Inspiration{/Source}
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