ANN ARBOR, Mich., May 15, 2019 – A new report by Radial and CFI Group provides retail customer insights from a survey of 500 online shoppers designed to understand their experiences across the customer service journey from digital properties to the contact center. The report shows growing expectations for customer service, and recommends that retailers invest in the tools, technology, and training needed to deliver an excellent customer service experience across the journey.

“Retail customers have high expectations for customer service,” says Sheri Petras, CEO of CFI Group. “Self-serve tools and online chat options are making it easier for customers to address problems on the website or mobile app quickly. If they end up calling customer service, they expect voice recognition technology, empowered professional agents, and customer account tools to all work together seamlessly to make issue resolution quick and easy.”

To assist customers in solving their issues online, retailers are making live chat readily available. About one in six (16%) retail customers who interact with customer service do so via online chat. Of those, 39% say they use it because it conveniently pops up when they’re on the site, up from 29% just a year ago.

Customers find chat helpful if it is with a live agent rather than a chatbot. Half of all customers who use chat say that at least some portion involves interaction with an automated response system (chatbot), compared to just 38% last year. However, retail customers who chat directly with a live agent are 17% more satisfied with customer service than are those who interact with a chatbot either exclusively or partially.

If customers need to call customer service, they expect agents to have all customer information at their fingertips, with access to the history of all prior interactions with the brand. For retail customers who contact customer service, 62% expect the agent to have knowledge of their previous interactions with the brand, and 24% say they expect the agent to see all customer interaction activity regardless of whether the activity was online or at a physical store.

Retailers who do not have the systems to enable agents to view this history can lose significant revenue. Almost one in four (23%) customers said they were less likely to make a purchase when the agent did not have access to their order history.

About Radial (www.radial.com)
Radial Inc., a bpost group company, is the leader in omnichannel commerce technology and operations, enabling brands and retailers to profitably exceed retail customer expectations. Radial’s technical, powerful omnichannel solutions connect supply and demand through efficient fulfillment and transportation options, intelligent fraud detection, payments, and tax systems, and personalized customer care services. Hundreds of retailers and brands confidently partner with Radial to simplify their post-click commerce and improve their customer experiences. Radial brings flexibility and scalability to their supply chains and optimizes how, when and where orders go from desire to delivery.