Cultivating long-term, meaningful customer relations is an important part of any business. It goes beyond offering an incredible product and encompasses the entire customer experience, which should be consistent across every interaction you have with your customers. According to a Microsoft report, 54% of consumers state that they have higher customer service expectations than they did previously. The pressure is on for businesses to differentiate themselves and take better care of their customers.

When Jeff Bezos was asked by CNN what the single most important feature of Amazon’s success was, his response was telling – “the most important thing is to focus obsessively on the customer.”1 With 90% of American consumers citing customer service as an important deciding factor in doing business with a company or not, providing great customer service can give companies a competitive edge.2 But what exactly does good customer service entail?

The importance of the retail customer experience has increased multifold over the pandemic, even at a time when a record number of retailers have had to shut down their physical stores. But this period has also set apart the cream of retail stores from their contemporaries, through their agility to provide a seamless retail customer experience online – finding ways to stay relevant even with a decrease in footfall, and adapting their existing strategy to be digital-first.

Whether your marketing goals are lofty and far-reaching or finite and quick to achieve, the most important element they provide is opportunity and momentum for improvement. Things are now shifting more to the online space, particularly due to the past year, where many industries had to pivot from a primarily offline focus into unfamiliar territory online. In response, companies’ approach to customer service has become a quickly evolving landscape, and team members must stay adaptable.

The customer experience market was valued at $6.5 billion in 2019 and is expected to experience a 17.7%¹ compound annual growth rate each year until 2027. With happy customers being the lifeblood of all businesses and the value of customer experience, it’s no surprise that 45.9%² of businesses rate customer experience as their most important priority over the next five years.

In 2020, close to 306.4 billion emails were exchanged each day, and this number is expected to shoot up to over 361.6 billion daily emails in 2024.1 With so many emails being sent and received on a daily basis, email management is critical for organizations to function smoothly. Especially for customer-facing teams that deal with customer emails, day in and day out.

Freshworks is a multi-product SaaS company offering numerous products in the customer experience, ITSM and CRM space, including Freshdesk, Freshservice, Freshworks CRM and more products you can find on our website. As you might imagine, there are various capabilities like notifications and emails that each of these products must offer, instances where the technology involved is deep in terms of complexity. We would benefit as an engineering organization by solving them exactly once.

In the business world, the necessity of successful digitization is becoming unavoidable, and there may be no area in which digital transformation is as important as customer support. Consumers have questions and problems, and they want them addressed immediately and on their own schedules. As a result, lots of companies are pouring resources into their digital transformation projects. Unfortunately, those efforts often fail due to a lack of planning or lack of employee buy-in.

Customer retention is a crucial part of any business’s operations. You’ve heard it all before – it’s much easier to get an existing customer to buy from you again than it is to win new customers. Your chance of selling to an existing customer is between 60–70%, compared to 5–20% for a new customer. Do you spend time marketing to your current customers and drawing them back into your sales funnel?

Last week, we were privileged to have some incredible industry experts from Retail Week, PayPal, Shopify, Parcelhub and Medallia discussing the most pressing matters in retail at an event we called Let’s Talk Shop – Your retail CX roadmap for 2021. We’ve put together this piece so you know what happened and what to take away.