5 Ways Retailers are Raising the Stakes on Customer Experiences

In poker, when a player “ups the ante,” the cost to compete in the respective hand becomes more expensive. Contenders separate themselves from pretenders as those with a lesser hand quickly fold when the stakes to participate increase. Additionally, the likelihood of a contender losing to a pretender decreases.

In retail, customers are consistently upping the ante on retailers. When consumers enjoy a new capability offered by one retailer, they expect others to quickly implement a similar experience or their satisfaction with retailers that are lacking will diminish.

The Unified Commerce Benchmark – an extensive, experiential evaluation of over 280 customer experience capabilities for more than 120 leading specialty retailers and digitally native vertical brands – identifies 40 differentiating customer experiences. Implementing these capabilities turn digital transformation investments into achievement of critical KPIs like increasing store traffic, conversions, and average order value, and reducing cart abandonment. This first-of-its-kind benchmark highlights five unified commerce experiences where Leaders in the benchmark have “up’ed the ante.”  The disparity between Leaders deploying the following differentiated customer experiences, and every other retailer, is stark:

• 80% of leading retailers enable customers to filter item results by fulfillment method compared to just 21% of non-leaders. That is a 59% variance.
• 93% of leading specialty retailers allow customers to check product availability status by store in cart view, compared to the 53% of non-leaders. That represents a 40% variance.
• 62% of Leaders display real-time inventory availability on product detail pages. There is a 37% variance between them and the 25% of non-leading retailers who offer it.
• 73% of leading brands offer product personalization or customization value-added services, while 39% of non-leaders do so. There is a 34% variance between the two groups.
• 86% of leading specialty retailers provide the option for customer to redeem loyalty points for payments, compared to 52% of non-leaders. That represents a 34% variance.

Knowing what your brand does, and doesn’t, deliver when compared to leading competitors is critically important. 

If you’re interested in exploring additional ways to up the ante on retailers, click here to download the complete Unified Commerce Benchmark.