Shopping Centre News attended Swinburne University of Technology’s Amplifying CX: What you need to do today and know about tomorrow. Customer experience is the new battleground for consumer-facing organisations (yes – retailers and shopping centres) as the industry fights for loyalty and customer needs increase.
Recently Forbes indicated 75% of companies report their top objective as improving customer experience and those companies who do it well will reap the financial benefits according to the ASX company financial results.
Bernie Brookes a spokesperson on retail and new Swinburne University Adjunct Industry Fellow said retailers need to consider two areas to remain successful:
1. Digital Disruption – rethink your omni channel presence but don’t over complicate or over invest.
2. Implications, competing on experience – has proven financial benefits and providing consistent high quality experiences to customers leads to loyalty. The best practice retailers put their own people at the heart of their customer strategy to create a culture which customer value.
Dr Sean Sands talked about the three biggest retail trends, many insights taken from the World Retail Congress:
AI – with one in three customers expecting personalised recommendations for both bricks-and-mortar, and online retailers this is a crucial statistic to jump on board.
Voice – 50 million Echo devices exist worldwide and it’s growing.
“In the next three to five years, we want you to be fully immersed in the Wayfair experience with AR, voice and other forms of technology. You should be able to say, here’s my space. I have a couple arm chairs and a side table. What can I do with this?” Mike Festa, Director of Wayfair Next
Visual – In a unique event activation, attendees experienced the app Snapchat for themselves with a specific event filter. The fact that 72% of millennials use Snapchat and one trillion photos were taken by Snapchat uses last week is an important statistic for retailers and marketers.
Sean is Co-Director of the Customer Experience & Insight (CXI) Research Group and Associate Professor of Marketing at Swinburne Business School.
