Cooking up remarkable retail experiences with Twilio
See how well-known brands whip up customer loyalty and retain retail employees with Twilio.
Many a cookbook starts with a culinary why. A chef’s big dreams. A restaurant’s humble beginnings. A recipe that goes back several generations. Our why pays homage to our customers' unique recipe for success and the Twilio products that helped them get there. We hope their stories inspire you to find the same.
Over the last century, the retail industry has seen its share of ups and downs in emerging trends and ideas. The fall of shopping malls. The rise of television. Consumers embracing credit cards. Consumers rushing to Amazon. Black Friday. Cyber Monday. As the world changes, retail spins madly on.
And as trends continue to change, the past two years are hardly ground zero for the retail world. As the pandemic ends, retailers are already bouncing back in a long line of successful innovative approaches to how business is done.
So what will the consumer shopping experience look like over the next few years?
Glad you asked.
We believe it will boil down to three key ingredients:
Personalization:
This will be massive. And we’re not just chatting about ‘Hi, First Name, Last Name’. We mean the kind of personalization that allows customers to engage with your business when, where, how, and why they want.
Why should you pay attention?
Customer loyalty.
98%
83%
Which generation is most affected by digital fatigue?
Millenials (as well as Gen Z) are the most affected by digital fatigue.
Convenience:
And speaking of loyalty, you’re also going to want to continue to consider how to make things increasingly more convenient for your customers both in-store and online.
During the pandemic, 75% of customers who were once loyal to a brand switched to a new brand in search of better value, availability, and convenience. But before you inundate your customers with options, remember that more doesn’t equal better. Digital fatigue is growing and figuring out how your customers want to be reached will make your interactions both convenient and meaningful.
Flexibility:
If you’re looking for loyalty with your employees, the future of hiring in retail is flexibility.
As customers moved online in troves in 2020, so did the retail teams serving them. The pandemic didn’t just reshape the way companies do business with their customers. It reshaped how companies engage with their employees and what the future of the modern workplace will look like. And if you want happier retail employees, (especially as 74% of retailers expect shortages in customer-facing positions in 2022) you’re going to want to pay attention to how to deliver more flexibility to them moving forward.
These three ingredients have been essential in helping our customers drive revenue and loyalty in the long run.
Want to do the same? Let’s get cooking.
Sweeten retail experiences with personalization
Admittedly, most cookbooks don’t start with the dessert section. But we also aren’t ones for following the status quo.
At Twilio, we believe great personalization, like a particularly good dessert, exceeds customer expectations. But for the icing on the cake, we use owned data and innovative customer engagement solutions.
More on that in a bit.
Great personalization exceeds customer expectations.
When you think you’re serving creme brulee, but it’s really just a jello mold…
Awkward.
According to Twilio's 2022 State of Engagement Report, 88% of companies say personalization is extremely or very important to their engagement strategy. Yet while 75% of companies claim to provide good or excellent personalized services, just 48% of customers agree.
Retail has done a pretty sweet job embracing and using personalization with the rise of e-commerce over the past 20 years. Today, retail companies large and small have an opportunity to use massive amounts of owned data from their online customers to enhance that customization even further.
TOOLS YOU'LL NEED TO GET STARTED
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) will be the way of the future as third-party cookies crumble (Our pun game is strong but that’s a real thing. You can read about it here). And zero- and first-party data are the bread and butter of the omnichannel strategies that many retailers have already invested in.
For example, first-party data can help retailers understand when customers want to hear from them and on what channels. Further, it helps with inventory forecasting, purchasing, and providing recommendations when an item is out of stock.
How Rugs.com whipped up 400% revenue growth by unifying its customer data across channels
Some of the greatest desserts have the fewest ingredients. Think about an ice cream sundae — your sprinkles, chocolate sauce, and whipped cream are simply there to elevate the star of the show. In the case of Rugs.com, the star is a Customer Data Platform (CDP).
In the face of an increasingly competitive online market for home goods, Rugs.com needed to improve its personalization efforts to deliver rich customer experiences. With multiple brands and properties across the globe, Rugs.com lacked a centralized source of customer data, resulting in missed opportunities to maximize customer lifetime value and retention.
Recipe for personalization
INGREDIENTS NEEDED
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Twilio Segment (CDP)
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A sweet tooth for data-powered performance marketing
RECIPE
Using Twilio Segment, the team unified its email and ad strategies across its family of brands to build personalized customer journeys and drive increased revenue growth. Rugs.com witnessed an increase in return on ad spend, which contributed to an unprecedented 400% YoY revenue growth. On top of that, the company saved 100+ engineering hours per week.
Piece of cake.
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A NOTE FROM THE CHEF
Why convenience is the secret ingredient
to brand loyalty
A dinner party should always be two things. Delicious and easy. A host who does too much is a host who can’t properly entertain guests. And if the food doesn’t taste good, guests may not return.
A customer retail experience isn’t that different. A convenient, satisfying experience means that your customers will always return. And that’s a party we want to be part of.
Despite these simple truths, customer loyalty is becoming increasingly difficult to cultivate and sustain and brands are feeling the pressure to create standout customer experiences every single time.
Convenience means that your customers will return.
When you spend eight hours braising a chicken but your guests would rather fill up on the cheese plate:
Let it brie.
Nine out of ten customers choose a brand based on convenience — their ability to reach out on any channel, find personalized recommendations and promotions, and quickly check out on that same channel.
So before you cook up a big flashy marketing campaign from scratch, consider integrating good ‘ol tried and true convenience into your customer journey.
Tips for adding convenience to your menu:
- Show up on the channels your customers use and prefer. Shoppers, on average, interact with nine channels before making a purchase,so it’s vital for retailers to pay attention to where customers spend most of their time.
- Cooking tip: Don’t over season your digital channels with customer communication. According to our recent State of Customer Engagement report, more than a third of people report experiencing digital fatigue in the past 30 days. And younger generations experience it even more with 42% of millennials and 47% of Generation Z reporting digital fatigue. Creating better (not more) interactions can ensure business doesn’t suffer as a result.
- Given that repeat customers have a higher chance of converting, retailers should also invest in loyalty programs. Sixty-four percent of shoppers check their loyalty status or points at least once a month. 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.
- Build convenience and customer trust at the same time with single-sign-ons that work with your customer’s personal communication preferences (such as Facebook or Gmail). Consumers want to spend money with brands that protect their data, are transparent about how they use their information, and honor their preferences for communication. But they still want their access to be a relatively seamless experience.
- Create a seamless brand experience between your digital and physical stores to ensure you’re not missing any customers who prefer one channel over the other in the process.
Here’s how our next customer put convenience at the top of their guest list:
- Show up on the channels your customers use and prefer. Shoppers, on average, interact with nine channels before making a purchase,so it’s vital for retailers to pay attention to where customers spend most of their time.
- Cooking tip: Don’t over season your digital channels with customer communication. According to our recent State of Customer Engagement report, more than a third of people report experiencing digital fatigue in the past 30 days. And younger generations experience it even more with 42% of millennials and 47% of Generation Z reporting digital fatigue. Creating better (not more) interactions can ensure business doesn’t suffer as a result.
- Given that repeat customers have a higher chance of converting, retailers should also invest in loyalty programs. Sixty-four percent of shoppers check their loyalty status or points at least once a month. 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.
- Build convenience and customer trust at the same time with single-sign-ons that work with your customer’s personal communication preferences (such as Facebook or Gmail). Consumers want to spend money with brands that protect their data, are transparent about how they use their information, and honor their preferences for communication. But they still want their access to be a relatively seamless experience.
- Create a seamless brand experience between your digital and physical stores to ensure you’re not missing any customers who prefer one channel over the other in the process.
Here’s how our next customer put convenience at the top of their guest list:
Instacart is serving up convenience in the grocery delivery space with two key ingredients
Tapping into their customers' appetite for convenience and quality, Instacart delivers groceries to thousands of customers in 375 cities across the U.S. The company disrupted the grocery-delivery market with a lean strategy that aligned sellers, drivers, and consumers, but something was falling flat in their recipe. They needed to spice up the experience for consumers and drivers by creating shopper efficiency, ensuring seamless communication between customers and shoppers, and maintaining privacy for both parties.
Recipe for convenience
INGREDIENTS NEEDED
RECIPE
Instacart integrated Twilio's SMS and notifications technologies to help them handle their end-to-end customer service, alert and inform shoppers, and manage their growing remote workforce. Most critical to the business is the speed at which alerts reach their personal shoppers, so they can begin to process the order and deliver on their hour-or-less promise. Plus, customers can connect with the brand whenever and however they choose, securely, and Instacart has instant access to customer insights.
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A NOTE FROM THE CHEF
Add flavor to your employee engagement approach with flexible technology
Of course, you’ve heard the saying there are too many cooks in the kitchen. With the great resignation, we’re looking at a bit of a different issue. How do we keep the cooks in our kitchens? How do we make sure they stay happy?
Brands need to respond to the pandemic-induced pressures on employees and the “great resignation” by investing in a workforce for the future. For retail specifically, this means changing everything from how customer service is delivered via remote contact centers to shifting traditional store space into warehouse distribution centers to aid the increase in online orders.
To keep employees from going stale, retailers must look at the latest technology trends. Consumers and employees alike crave flexibility in how they interact with your company.
Food for thought:
With 91% of consumers saying they are more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant offers and personalized recommendations, the future of retail means utilizing distributed and agile workforces that can deliver on these types of experiences regardless of location.
For many small shops and direct-to-consumer brands, this means investing even more on the e-commerce front and making sure they have the agile workforce to do so. For bigger retailers, it means accelerating migration to the cloud and adopting remote contact centers to support that distributed workforce.
Here’s how our final customer took their employee engagement from half-baked to *chef’s kiss*:
How Shopify mastered the recipe to support their distributed workforce using Twilio Flex
By 2020, Shopify had grown to support more than one million businesses in more than 175 countries. But as they grew, their legacy contact center for managing customer relationships couldn’t keep up. You might say they were using a hand whisk on a batter that really required an electric mixer.
They were forced to use disparate tools in different systems, causing frustration for agents and making it impossible to deliver the level of customer service they knew they could,and needed to, provide. Shopify sought out a custom, flexible, and scalable solution that could be easily updated.
Recipe for flexibility
INGREDIENTS NEEDED
- Contact Center (Twilio Flex)
- A willingness to try out a new approach to employee engagement
RECIPE
The Shopify team quickly realized they didn’t have to create their own in-house solution. Flex provided exactly what they needed to build a custom contact center unencumbered by the restrictions plaguing their legacy provider.
The team allocated eight months to build. As it turned out, they only needed half that time. They rolled out the new Flex telephone system, routing engine, skill trees and Interactive Voice Response (IVR), as well as contextual information the agents needed about each customer.
Further, agents are now able to easily integrate dozens of supporting apps and software for a truly personalized approach for each customer relationship. And the best part of this successful recipe? It took only four months and five developers to build.
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A NOTE FROM THE CHEF
The secret sauce to retail customer loyalty and employee engagement
Each of our customers has found a unique and special recipe using Twilio products to season their own success. With the three key ingredients below as a guide, retailers can find long-term relevance and loyalty with their customer base now and in the future:
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Personalization: Create personalized experiences using first-party data
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Convenience: Build convenience into your customer journey
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Flexibility: Utilize flexible technology for a more agile workforce
Bon appetit!
What will your perfect recipe for customer engagement look like?