Twilio for Retail:
Top 10 Use Cases
Improve customer acquisition cost and lifetime value
About this ebook
It’s no secret that the face of the retail industry has changed dramatically in recent years. In 2020, ecommerce experienced a decade of out-of-this-world growth in just three months. While the ecommerce growth has come back down to earth, consumer behavior will never be the same. Consumers have gone from shopping either fully in-store or fully online to now engaging with brands across multiple channels and touchpoints (sometimes simultaneously). Repeated interactions with your brand need to soar beyond novelty and land squarely into creating value to keep your customer’s attention.
Let’s say your customer is shopping for a new TV. A shopper might drop into a store, browse the website, open an email campaign, receive an Instagram ad, read a product recommendation, and get a coupon via SMS before making a purchase online.
What does that mean for brands? It means that retail organizations need to be more strategic than ever. They are challenged to create seamless experiences that engage customers across every channel. UX, marketers, and technology leaders need to join forces to ensure that they are able to:
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Understand customers better than ever before (and in real-time) to deliver personalized experiences across all touch points
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Have the flexibility to quickly test new ideas and then adapt them as needed
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Establish trust to earn long-term loyalty, by seamlessly and securely protecting customer information
How to use this ebook
These days it’s not just about getting the customer, it’s about bringing the customer in at a price that fits your budget and improves your bottom line. Don’t waste money on marketing that doesn’t matter. Hit the right audience, at the right time using the following strategies:
- Personalized Omnichannel Marketing
- Self-Serve Automation
- Digital Clienteling
- Customer 360
- Identity Verification
What’s better than getting new customers at a great price? Improving their overall lifetime value. Ensure that you’re driving long term value by delivering timely information, with flexible tools that facilitate two-way conversations. Keep their data safe and their needs met with the following approaches:
- Flexible Contact Center
- Alerts & Notifications
- Build Your Own Experience
- Data Privacy
- Customer Loyalty
We know that creating a cost-effective and valuable shopping experience isn’t easy. That’s why you should steal these top CAC and CLV strategies from other retail brands that are reinventing the shopping experience.
Let’s get started!
It’s been a rough few years. The retail industry had to make accommodations for uncertain times and consumers have adjusted to a new normal. Today’s shopping experience is customized, convenient, and fluid. In order to keep up, retail leaders must leverage data and meet customers where they are in the new shopping environment.
What does today’s consumer expect? A seamless, personalized experience. It’s true. Shoppers expect consistent experiences across all touch-points. No big deal, right?
Of course to meet that expectation, retailers must be able to offer the same level of personalization, regardless of whether customers are shopping in-store, on their mobile device, or on social media apps.
Nearly half of consumers say they will likely become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience (and spend 34% more on average).
Why is personalized omnichannel marketing so hard?
Retailers know it’s not as easy as it sounds. Here are a few of the most daunting challenges:
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Fragmented customer data. Customer data is often fragmented living across both internal and external databases. Retailers need access to first-party data to understand when customers want to hear from them, what they care about, and their preferred channels for engagement.
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Communication on their terms. Shoppers, on average, interact with nine channels before making a purchase. Retailers need access to reliable and scalable communication channels in order to reach customers where they are across their shopping journey.
- Inefficient marketing operations infrastructure. How can your marketing team manage this omnichannel experience? With a complicated technology stack, marketing operations can be slow moving and ineffective, which makes it challenging to know which campaigns are effective.
The Good News: We have the technology
With Twilio, you can deliver personalized, cross-channel communications where, when, and how your customers want. Here are three big things Twilio can help with to ensure you are meeting customers’ expectations:
Buying something online is sometimes a straightforward walk down the path to conversion, but more often it’s a winding road of detours, stops, and shoe changes. That’s why it comes as no surprise that consumers access the internet on an average of 12.3 devices, platforms, and channels (Forester). With each change, an opportunity emerges for retailers to gain insights about the preferences and habits of their customers in real time.
Yet customer data captured from interactions across dozens of digital touchpoints is stuck in silos across the organization, making the data difficult to consolidate and access in real time.
40% of companies feel that getting accurate customer data for personalization is a challenge.
(State of Personalization Report)
Why can’t everyone have a 360 degree view of the customer right now?
Siloed data across the organization means that there is too much data in too many places. And retailers are struggling to find a way to draw insights from it all. Here’s how that might show up in your organization:
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There’s a lot of bad data. Teams across the business have access to bad or latent customer data, which makes decisions on marketing spend, merchandising, customer service, and IT difficult.
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Turning bad data into good data is hard. To try to turn that data into something valuable, retailers spend significant time (dare we say, too much) and money (definitely too much) to collect, clean, integrate, and administer customer data.
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Sales and service agents have to work too hard to serve customers well. They are juggling multiple disconnected systems to piece together an understanding of a customer’s interactions with the organization, creating friction and delays when resolving cases.
- Most interactions lack context. Valuable data from these interactions is often lost. Support calls aren't one-and-done conversations. Service agents should be able to record and leverage details about customers to inform future engagements.
The Good News: Twilio can help you unify your data
With Twilio, you can build profiles and audiences with real-time customer interactions collected across digital touchpoints. All of this is possible using our low-code approach. In fact, this holistic approach allows you to:
When it comes to selling stuff, a widget is a widget is a widget. Because retailers often sell similar or identical merchandise as their competitors, it’s all about differentiation. To differentiate and meet new customer expectations, retailers of all varieties have pushed into the concept of digital clienteling to establish long-term customer relationships based on data about individual preferences, behaviors, and purchases.
Digital clienteling allows retailers to engage their customers where they are regardless of customer touchpoint, shopping channel, or communication channel.
Brands that leverage clienteling increase retention rates by as much as 200%.
(Hootsuite)
Clienteling isn’t easy
Providing guidance and expertise at the point of the purchase decision comes with challenges. Here are a few of them:
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Creating a consistent VIP experience: Retailers need to provide the in-store VIP experience across many channels to engage and delight customers.
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Collecting the right information: That VIP strategy means retailers need to know each customer’s individual preferences to provide a “personal shopper” style service.
- Getting the right information at the right time. To deliver personalized interactions and enhance the customer experience, sales associates also need to leverage technology in real-time to operate as “Trusted Advisors.”
The Good News: It is possible to capture more spend from customers
With Twilio, retailers can build stronger customer relationships to increase basket size and increase purchase frequency. One major retailer that implemented Twilio found that customers in a clienteling relationship spent more, shopped with the brand more, and were more loyal. By leveraging technology, retailers can inject expertise of stylists, athletes, and technicians in the shopping journey at the moment of purchase.
Here’s how brands can use digital clienteling experiences to learn more about their customers and synthesize that data to deliver more personalized experiences across every touchpoint:
Bonobos increased customer purchases 3x by understanding and influencing shopping behavior.
Ring ring “Hello?” “Please hold while we get you to the next available agent…” “Noooooooo….” 😭 Did you know that 18% of consumers said they would rather lose the internet for a day than speak with a company’s support team? And 56% said they would stop doing business with a company after a poor interaction? Good customer experiences are straightforward; consumers are looking for ease, convenience, and personalization.
Meeting those expectations is no longer optional to create the type of relationship that most organizations want with their customers.
61% of customers expect that the majority of their future service interactions with companies will be automated
(Zendesk)
Why is upleveling the customer support experience so hard?
Retail businesses face steep challenges delivering support that meets these expectations. A high volume of routine inquiries like order status queries or shipping questions often clogs support channels. And higher value requests get lost in the process. But automating service comes with significant challenges:
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High cost for low-impact issues. Simple requests fielded by human agents have an incredibly high cost to serve, and they increase wait times for all customers, which impacts CSAT & NPS.
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Customers aren’t willing to compromise. Most consumers want correct answers quickly, whether from technology or a human agent.
- Canned responses aren’t welcomed. Self-service technology needs to be customizable for specific business and customer needs.
The Good News: Self-service support is within your grasp
With Twilio, retailers can enable customers to resolve their issues via self-service, leaving call-center agents available to address larger issues. To create this streamlined process, Twilio offers optimized call experiences with intelligent call routing, as well as self-service experiences with IVR, bots, and voice recognition. Plus, when automation is infused with real-time contextual analytics, retailers can leverage customer information and route it to agents to deliver a personalized “wow” experience. To get to “wow”, do this:
Marks & Spencer modernized and enhanced their customers’ shopping experience with a centralized cloud-based contact center and a sophisticated notification strategy leading to 10 seconds saved on each call.
Ring ring “Hello?” “Please hold while we get you to the next available agent…” “Noooooooo….” 😭 Did you know that 18% of consumers said they would rather lose the internet for a day than speak with a company’s support team? And 56% said they would stop doing business with a company after a poor interaction? Good customer experiences are straightforward; consumers are looking for ease, convenience, and personalization.
Meeting those expectations is no longer optional to create the type of relationship that most organizations want with their customers.
61% of customers expect that the majority of their future service interactions with companies will be automated
(Zendesk)
Why is upleveling the customer support experience so hard?
Retail businesses face steep challenges delivering support that meets these expectations. A high volume of routine inquiries like order status queries or shipping questions often clogs support channels. And higher value requests get lost in the process. But automating service comes with significant challenges:
-
High cost for low-impact issues. Simple requests fielded by human agents have an incredibly high cost to serve, and they increase wait times for all customers, which impacts CSAT & NPS.
-
Customers aren’t willing to compromise. Most consumers want correct answers quickly, whether from technology or a human agent.
- Canned responses aren’t welcomed. Self-service technology needs to be customizable for specific business and customer needs.
The Good News: Self-service support is within your grasp
With Twilio, retailers can enable customers to resolve their issues via self-service, leaving call-center agents available to address larger issues. To create this streamlined process, Twilio offers optimized call experiences with intelligent call routing, as well as self-service experiences with IVR, bots, and voice recognition. Plus, when automation is infused with real-time contextual analytics, retailers can leverage customer information and route it to agents to deliver a personalized “wow” experience. To get to “wow”, do this:
Marks & Spencer modernized and enhanced their customers’ shopping experience with a centralized cloud-based contact center and a sophisticated notification strategy leading to 10 seconds saved on each call.
What do they want? Transparency! When do they want it? Now! In the new fluid shopping journey, consumers expect to buy, fulfill, and return anywhere. And they want to be informed at every step of that journey. Customers expect timely communications for order confirmations, shipping notifications, returns and more.
Nine out of ten consumers are more likely to choose a retailer based on convenience.
(National Retail Federation)
Who struggles with real-time messages and customer transparency?
Most retailers. No amount of legacy systems is going to provide a reliable and scalable platform that can handle those expectations to deliver messages in real time (and at scale).
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Getting the right message to the right person. Retailers need to ensure that the messages reach the intended recipient, because undelivered messages increase operational costs due to resend requests and increased support tickets.
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Planning for the unexpected. It’s highly important to ensure unexpected spikes in communication volume and new requirements are handled without interruption.
- Flexibility must be built-in from the start. Consumers expect to be able to reroute orders and deliveries during fulfillment.
The Good News: We can send the messages, securely
With Twilio, retailers can deliver critical alerts and notifications securely by tailoring the channel and frequency of alerts based on customer preferences. Twilio provides the building blocks to develop critical communications that meet customer expectations while reducing overhead by only paying for the channels that they need. Ensure messages reach their intended recipients in real-time, including purchase, order and delivery confirmation, returns and substitutions, as well as post-purchase follow-up and subscriptions. Plus, retailers can enable the consumer to take action on an order, like rerouting a shipment, as well as make changes or substitutions. Here’s what will help you take it to the next level:
Twilio enables Instacart to achieve one hour deliveries by ensuring seamless communications with customers and shoppers.
Much like the latest fashion trends (“mom” jeans, anyone?), consumer shopping habits are quickly changing. To meet the increasing demand for more flexible, frictionless brand interactions, retailers need to find solutions that solve today’s requirements yet have an eye on tomorrow. The increasingly fluid shopping journey has forced retailers to experiment, test, and learn with new products and platforms to stay ahead of consumer expectations.
Building your own experience like virtual store experiences could increase customer satisfaction 20%
(RetailWire)
What do retailers need to do to craft flexible, frictionless brand experiences?
Brands must experiment. People across retail organizations need to test theories, collect information, and learn about the needs of their customers. To do that, first you need to do the following:
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Build and grow at the same time. Run real-time personalization experiments with customer data while scaling business rapidly
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Implement flexible technology. Build a flexible tech stack that allows you to switch quickly to another software solution without losing time or historical data if one isn't performing
- Prioritize integration to prevent silos. Integrate existing acquired technology and services and scale new solutions across the business
The Good News: Easily move from prototype to production
With Twilio, retailers are able to build the ultimate customer experience to make their retail vision a reality. Leveraging Twilio’s developer friendly products, like Twilio Flex, Messaging, and SendGrid Email retailers are able to easily transition from proof of concept to production. They can create new solutions and experiences that are flexible and can adapt to lessons learned and changing consumer preferences over time.
Twilio empowers Shopify with everything they need to build the customer experience the way they want, without having to change their business.
Identity Verification
Those identity verification CAPTCHA grids seem straight forward, but what if you miss a corner of a bus, or the top of a streetlamp, or blurry bit of the crosswalk? That can bring a prospect to a halt when it comes to creating a new account. Providing an easy and secure account activation for users is crucial for any app, site, or business. In fact, it can actually make or break whether someone follows through with that digital interaction or not. Forty-eight percent of U.S. consumers abandoned online account onboarding or setups over the past 12 months after finding the process too frustrating, difficult, time-consuming, or untrustworthy (Twilio).
Consumers have proven to reward brands that both protect their information and offer seamless onboarding experiences - every dollar invested into onboarding solutions returns $412 in lifetime value.
(Twilio)
How many organizations are getting held up by the account activation process?
Too many! Not only does it act as a barrier to purchase, but the account activation process is a critical place to learn more about your customers. But there are several significant challenges even at this early stage in the customer journey:
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Cross-channel security. Retailers need to offer a seamless, secure experience across channels that prevents fake account creation and drives conversions
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One-size fits all onboarding. They need to easily and cost-effectively scale these tailored onboarding processes, especially as user numbers grow
- Security without sacrificing convenience. They need seamless identity verification to avoid dirty, duplicate, and inactive customer profiles in their database.
The Good News: You can create secure, frictionless account activation
With Twilio, businesses are able to make onboarding fast and safe for users, helping retailers grow their trustworthiness among consumers. Retailers can easily combat fraud, capture clean customer data to grow their database, and authorize account actions with multi-channel user verification. Securely onboard legitimate users with minimal friction, and protect customers with two-factor authentication. Uphold customer trust by controlling customer permissions by channel, verifying users via the channel they prefer. Provide the best experience by doing this:
MercadoLibre protects sellers with Twilio to secure Latin America's largest e-commerce infrastructure.
Data Privacy
The world’s worst email to receive usually includes the phrase “security breach” in the subject line. Opening that email could illicit, at best, a groan of frustration, and at worst, lost revenue and reputation. In fact, “the majority of consumers say that trust is a critical factor in determining loyalty - 85%”, in fact (Shopify). Customers expect retailers to take care of their accounts, personal data. They rely on brands to be judicious with communication. Because of that, retailers need to practice good data etiquette and a proactive approach to data privacy and protection to ensure consumer trust and build better and stronger customer relationships.
43% of companies say consumers will stop purchasing their products if they don't meet their data privacy requirements
(Twilio)
Doing the right thing isn’t always easy
With 71% of consumers are demanding greater privacy and transparency from B2C companies (2022 State of Customer Engagement Report), retailers are facing increased pressure and challenges to meet expectations:
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With more high profile cyber security attacks than ever before, privacy and compliance regulations are rapidly increasing and evolving around the world.
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If a brand is operating globally or wants to expand, there are data management complexities across privacy and residency.
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Google has announced that they will be sunsetting third-party cookies in 2024, so it is critical to have data compliance practices in place for the collection of 1st party data.
The Good News: There’s a way to get streamlined regulation and security
With Twilio, retailers have access to technology solutions to comply with regulations, while protecting customer accounts and responsibly managing customer data (PII, GDPR etc). Brands are also able to respect privacy preferences to strengthen the customer relationship, while avoiding customer churn and bad brand publicity due to cyber security and account hacks. In order to benefit from this, you must:
With Twilio, DoorDash ensures secure, automated communications between DoorDash dispatch, dashers, and customers for streamlined, seamless operations and delivery.
What’s the saying? “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” Yup, that’s the one. Well, it turns out it’s true. Customers that are familiar with your brand are less costly to sell to. They know who you are, what you’re selling, and have a higher propensity to be loyal to your brand. But to get that level of stickiness, retailers need to build trust. They need to provide a secure and convenient experience that compels customers to keep coming back.
One way to deepen a brand’s relationship with customers is through reward programs, product and feature updates, and relevant content updates. Given that repeat customers have a higher chance of converting, retailers should invest in loyalty programs.
64% percent of shoppers check their loyalty status or points at least once a month.
(Twilio)
It’s not all happy customers and punchcards, building loyalty comes with challenges
Building really meaningful loyalty programs isn’t easy. Combine that with high customer expectations, retailers need to:
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Make it easier. Remove barriers and friction from onboarding and loyalty program sign-ups so that customers can quickly engage.
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Make it helpful. Make it easy for your customers to check their status in your app, or website, or by sending regular notification updates in their preferred channel.
- Make it safe. Avoid account fraud and abuse by implementing identity verification and data privacy practices into the customer experience to retain customers.
The Good News: You can build flexible, successful loyalty programs
With Twilio, retailers are able to secure lifetime loyalty by delivering personalized and secure experiences without spamming or overwhelming customers. With clean and accurate customer profiles, brands are able to launch and scale successful loyalty programs. Plus, this data that is now gathered across all digital touchpoints can be reused across marketing, merchandising, supply chain, and IT to build high potential lifetime value (LTV) customers, brand ambassadors, and even future employees.
Allergan relaunched its loyalty program with Twilio and generated $400 million in new revenue.
