Use Case - Retail
How a retail partner lowered attrition rates by 3% and shrinkage by 6%
We partnered with a client in the retail industry in 2013 and designed a retention project to strengthen their relationship with our customer experience management team – resulting in a better omnichannel experience for their customers.
Goals
Improve in-store experience through better customer support, and address high employee turnover in customer service departments.
Challenges
This retail partner was suffering from high turnover and limited in-store support. Customer satisfaction was taking a hit because they were struggling to scale customer service.
Results
Global Response implemented several data-backed strategies to lower attrition rates and improve the customer experience across all channels.
Improving CSAT while lowering employee attrition rates
In 2013, a large retail industry client partnered with Global Response’s customer experience management team and trusted us to provide the highest quality omnichannel customer care. The client believed in our commitment to continuous improvement and our strategic approach to best practices.
The challenge
Before their partnership with Global Response, they had limited in-store customer support and needed additional assistance to help customers in stores.
We were primarily engaged to improve upon and scale customer experience management.
The strategies
To date, services now include store customer care, store support, e-commerce support, phone and email customer care, live chat, social media monitoring, and a Foresee survey response and Power Review response.
Our configurations for the client now include voice switch integration with their CRM ticketing platform to track customer cases. We also helped design and implement a cloud-based omnichannel customer support platform.
Here are a few more strategies we implemented with our partner:
- The Retention Project: We engaged a multi-phase internal tracking method to target and lower attrition rates, which the account manager designed for this client after a Global Response team training.
- Loyalty Strategy: We added a loyalty treatment to the interactive voice response software. When the system recognizes customers as loyalty members (when the phone number calling us matches with the loyalty database), they automatically skip the IVR menu and become a priority in the queue, which routes them to the next available customer experience management specialist.
- Speech Analytics: We conducted a deep dive into speech analytics to understand the trends in customer inquiries and how the customer experience management team handles them.
- “Voice of the Customer”: We applied analytics to make critical recommendations to our partner about inventory and customer improvements. For example, due to the number of calls regarding the returns process, we recommended creating a return merchandise authorization (RMA) form available to the customer either in the packaging with their order or via the website. This recommendation resulted in a smoother returns process and fewer calls to the customer experience team.
The results
Global Response helped this partner lower attrition rates by 3% and shrinkage by 6%.
This result is a strong example of our commitment to our relationship with our clients. Our team constantly finds creative, strategic solutions to deliver an excellent customer experience and be proactive about challenges to our team.
Our unique Retention Project tracking method helps pinpoint current employees’ attendance and adherence. We designed the project to reduce attrition rates and increase team productivity and efficiency, which translates to a better overall brand experience for our client’s customers. So far, voluntary attrition has reduced by 3%, and external shrinkage has decreased by 6% in just one quarter.
Success in the retention project led to expanded customer support avenues and improved quality of customer service in the client’s omnichannel support.