Customer Experience Trends for the Retail Industry

The retail industry and consumer behavior change constantly. To succeed in this endlessly evolving, competitive landscape, retailers must prioritize what consumers want and need from their brand.

Today’s shoppers expect more than quality products and services—they demand engaging, tailored experiences throughout their interactions with your brand. Luckily, your retail business can leverage innovative digital tools and software solutions to gain valuable insight into customer behavior and take a more strategic approach to attracting and retaining shoppers. 

In this blog we cover customer experience (CX) retail trends and explain how to use them to your business’s advantage.

Eight Customer Experience Retail Trends

Retail trends are always changing. However, the need to provide excellent customer experiences that set your business apart from the competition and drive brand loyalty remains unchanged. Years of technological advancement and studying customer behavior in retail stores have produced tools and solutions to enhance shopper experiences.

1. Omnichannel Integration

Today’s consumers want convenience. You can meet your shoppers where they are, across their preferred channels, by offering an omnichannel retail model. Your brand can integrate your physical stores, website, mobile apps and social media profiles to deliver the most seamless shopping experience possible. 

An omnichannel approach to retail can increase sales and conversions by offering consumers greater flexibility and allowing them to browse, buy and return products through their preferred channel. An omnichannel approach also enables your business to gather more data on consumer behavior across each channel, helping you understand preferences and deliver enhanced shopping and customer service experiences. 

2. Loyalty Programs

Implementing a loyalty or rewards program for your customers is an excellent way to encourage brand loyalty and repeat purchases. 

However, starting a loyalty program is not enough to boost sales. In a 2022 survey, American consumers said they belonged to an average of 16.6 loyalty programs but were active participants in fewer than half of them. Your retail business must determine what offers, discounts and rewards will motivate and excite your shoppers, inspiring long-term engagement. 

A huge advantage of having a robust loyalty program is being able to collect consumer data, such as:

• Preferences
• Purchase history
• Shopper behavior

You can use these insights to elevate CX by tailoring recommendations, promotions and experiences.

3. Hyper-Personalization

Personalization is one of the most valuable CX trends in retail. By offering custom interactions with your brand, you can make shoppers feel special, valued and important. Examples of hyper-personalization include product recommendations based on shopping history and targeted marketing campaigns with personalized offers. 

Tailored experiences are essential in today’s retail landscape because about 62% of U.S. consumers say they won’t remain loyal after a non-personalized encounter with a brand. Hyper-personalization increases:

• Customer engagement
• Loyalty
• Satisfaction
• Retention
• Revenue

4. Frictionless Shopping

Customer buying behavior in retailing has changed considerably over the past few years. With customer journey analytics, your business can identify key friction points in your customer journeys. Some examples of opportunities to reduce friction may include fixing a complicated checkout process, increasing continuity between your business’s website and mobile app or adding customer service hours. 

A minor inconvenience can send shoppers to your competitors, so finding ways to refine and streamline interactions with your retail business is essential for optimizing the customer experience and boosting revenue. You can use journey analytics to identify friction points and establish a plan to address potential issues. 

5. AI-Powered Customer Service

Another CX trend that your retail business can use to supercharge customer service efforts is artificial intelligence (AI). AI tools are here to stay. In fact, experts project the global market will grow to over $31 billion by 2028. AI-powered tools such as chatbots, virtual assistants and interactive voice response (IVR) systems enhance customer service by providing

• 24/7 assistance and instant, automated responses to inquiries
• Simultaneous handling of many calls

Your business can use AI to save time, money and energy while delivering better customer experiences for shoppers. 

6. Virtual Try-Ons and Augmented Reality

Virtual try-ons and augmented reality (AR) extend greater flexibility and convenience to shoppers, enhancing their experience with your retail brand. 

These immersive technologies give consumers greater confidence in their buying decisions, reducing the likelihood of dissatisfaction and returns. AR and virtual reality allow for an engaging shopping experience that can integrate across channels and increase the likelihood of a sale. These tools can also enhance product discovery through interactive suggestions and an effortless try-on process, making upselling and cross-selling easier than ever. 

7. Empower Employees With Data

Your employees’ attitudes and behavior directly impact customer experiences. Empowering your workers with data tools and insights is a leading trend in the retail industry. Through training and ongoing education, you can help your staff gain the knowledge they need to deliver excellent interactions every time.

Retail customer behavior analytics and real-time inventory insights are two especially beneficial data solutions that your employees can use to provide tailored shopping suggestions and product recommendations. Your retail team can leverage data to boost customer satisfaction and make employees’ daily tasks more manageable. 

8. Focus on Customer Experience After the Sale

Many retailers focus primarily on the sale, neglecting the subsequent interactions customers have with their brand. That is a costly mistake because poor customer service damages customer loyalty. According to the PwC Customer Loyalty Survey, 32% of respondents said they would stop buying from a company they otherwise liked after a bad experience with customer service.

Making it quick and easy to interact with your brand improves CX and loyalty. Take steps to improve several important post-purchase customer journeys, including 

• Receive purchased products and services (provide updates regarding delivery status).
• Report missing or undelivered products.
• Replace or return a purchased product.
• Complain about a product (provide updates on the status of the complaint).
• Receive proactive alerts about suspicious activity on an account. 

Nurturing customers after the sale is essential for experience led growth and differentiating traditional retailers from digital disrupters who win primarily on price. According to McKinsey, experience-led growth refers to a strategy that drives profitable growth: 

“Providing a distinctive customer experience (CX), consistently and proactively, that entices existing customers who choose their brand. These customers change their behaviors, and such behavior changes can be measured by concrete financial metrics like share of wallet, repeat purchases, or net revenue retention (NRR).”