Part 1 - How UCaaS can provide a strategic advantage in the retail industry

Introduction 

The retail industry is a dynamic and multifaceted environment that encompasses everything from brick-and-mortar stores and distribution centres, to online stores and marketplaces. Like every industry, it faces unique challenges, which require seamless communication across all touchpoints to overcome. Businesses in the retail space need to ensure excellent customer service and streamlined internal operations across all locations and touchpoints.

Traditional phone lines and fragmented communication tools often fail to meet these needs to a high enough standard, which can lead to inefficiencies and poor customer experiences. A quality UCaaS solution can be a hugely beneficial solution.  By combining multiple communication tools such as voice, video and messaging into one platform. UCaaS provides a scalable, cost-effective solution that enhances employee productivity and collaboration at the same time as improving customer satisfaction. In this three-part blog series, we will explore how businesses can optimise their communication tools to best suit the retail industry.

The focus of this installment will be how to understand the unique needs and complexities of the retail space.

Distributed workforces

Retail employees are often spread across different locations - urban stores, rural distribution centres, and even international operations. Ensuring consistent, high-quality communication across these dispersed teams can be challenging, particularly with legacy communication systems. UCaaS enables cloud-based communication accessible from any location, offering seamless connectivity to employees no matter where they are.

For example, a retail business may have 500 brick and mortar stores and 10 distribution centres dispersed nationally or even internationally, where communication needs to be seamless to connect all of these locations. Not only this, but employees in different roles need to be able to communicate with one another, for example retail employees to store managers, to head office and warehouse staff. Delayed communication could cause issues with stock replenishment and customer enquiries, whereas if the business utilises a UCaaS solution, operational delays will be reduced and collaboration will be improved across all locations, even remotely.

This is key as retailers increasingly adopt a ‘phygital’ strategy, where both physical and digital experiences are merged for customers. This could be ordering online and collecting in store, for example. According to industry studies, up to 74% of consumers make purchasing decisions based on their customer experience alone. To meet customer demands and support staff in providing great customer service both online and in person, seamless, reliable communication streams are vital.

Customer interaction channels

Customers require a choice of communication touchpoints, including in-store assistance, online chat, phone call and email. All of these channels need to be effectively managed to deliver top notch customer experience. A quality UCaaS solution will consolidate all of these channels into one single platform, which allows the appropriate employees to manage multiple channels of customer inquiries easily and efficiently which can improve response time and resolution accuracy.

Retailers especially are under increasing pressure as the expectation of ‘instant service’ becomes the norm. Research shows that delays due to leveraging multiple tools on different platforms when processing customer transitions and queries are a major customer service pain point; UCaaS eliminates this by unifying all key business tools through rich platforms and integrations.

Operational efficiency

Businesses in the retail industry depend on various operational systems, such as supply chain management, inventory control, CRM tools and order fulfilment. Disjointed communications can lead to bottlenecks and delays to essential tasks, such as stock taking, order fulfilment and tracking, and shipments. This means communications need to be easy to manage and access all in one place, and it is useful if the UCaaS solution can integrate with existing business tools and  data, such as CRMs and wallboards, so that all business activities can be seamlessly managed.

Final thoughts

Stay tuned for the next installments of this blog series, where we will dive deeper into the oppertunities UCaaS creates for MSPs, as well as how UCaaS solutions can be tailored to specifically suit businesses in the retail sector.

Get in touch today to learn more!