Using AI-Native VoC to Enhance Retail Customer Experience

Introduction

Imagine after a long week, you visit you visit a local clothing store to find an outfit for an upcoming event. You spot the perfect piece you’ve been looking for but cannot find your size, so you ask a staff member for help. The staff member, visibly annoyed, curtly replies, “If it’s not on the rack, we don’t have it,” before turning away without further assistance. Discouraged by the rude interaction, you leave empty-handed, vowing never to return.

This interaction is more than just a lost sale for the retail business. It’s a lost customer, and we all know how expensive it is to acquire a new one. Negative experiences can spread like wildfire, especially in today’s world of social media and online reviews.

As a leader, you cannot always monitor everything to prevent such situations, so how can AI help recover such issues quickly before they snowball and ensure they do not happen again?

Understanding the role of AI in Customer Experience (CX)

According to a Google Cloud survey in 2023, 81% of retail decision-makers feel an urgency to adopt generative AI technologies, with 72% ready to deploy these technologies in the coming year. Of course, retailers want to use AI to support the overall CX from better stock management, demand forecasting, theft prevention, to personalised customer interactions and so on, which are crucial for modern retailers facing global competition and changing consumer expectations.

So how do you know what to do and what is working (and what is not)? To understand this, Customer experience (CX) requires the Voice of the Customer (VoC) or a feedback loop to gather, analyse, and act on customer feedback to ensure their needs and expectations are met and exceeded.  Through AI-native VoC management, analysing vast amounts of data can transform raw, often vague, customer feedback into clear insights.

So, let’s dig deeper and see how AI can supercharge your feedback loop.

Utilising AI in the feedback loop

According to William Brown in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning 2021, the primary goals of AI include:

• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: AI systems can process and interpret complex customer feedback, translating it into actionable insights.
• Automated Planning and Scheduling: AI can automate response strategies, ensuring timely and efficient actions based on customer feedback.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP): NLP enables AI to understand and interpret customer feedback in natural language, making it easier to analyse and act upon.

These goals align closely with modern retail’s needs, which require data collection and deep, insightful analysis that drives action.

Specifically, AI is involved in closing the inner and outer loop in such a fashion that requires speed and precision.

Here’s how the supercharged feedback loop works:

Tailor feedback channels

In retail, listening is the foundation of a VoC strategy. Here are the different ways AI is used to collect feedback:

Conversational way of collecting feedback

Integrating chatbots in websites and through SMS also increases response rates, enabling visitors to engage in real-time conversations, enhance user experience, and bring brand personality to life.

Collecting feedback without asking a single question

Facial Analytics is another exciting channel that has emerged through AI adoption that goes beyond just sentiments and inputs.

Through the Resonate.CX platform, for example, the Facial Analytics capabilities allow users the following:

• Real-time feedback: AI can identify emotion, the number of people who visited a store, and correlate recommendations to time, gender, and demographics.
• Integrate natively with the Resonate CX platform: Shows vital stats and emotional heartbeat of the physical space to be able to compare before and after emotions by demographics.
• Measure sentiment change over time: Shows real-time changes in business units and products.

The best part is that no personal information is collected, so the shoppers’ personal information is safe and adheres to privacy laws and data protection regulations.

Collecting feedback from voice channels to convert into text

Converting verbal feedback from phone calls into text makes feedback collection more convenient for people who cannot find the time to give feedback using other channels. AI eliminates the need to go through large volume of feedback, and instead get it all processed as text while understanding overall themes, trends, and sentiments in no time. Using AI’s quick capabilities to transcribe verbal feedback into text empowers retailers to harness their most valuable asset—the Voice of the Customer.

Through collecting feedback from speech to text, retailers can:

• Enable accurate and high-value service recovery: Understand pain points and resolve issues on the first call.
• Improve operational efficiency and reduce service cost: Resonate CX empowers teams to excel while handling higher call volumes efficiently.
• Get omnichannel insights fast and accurately in one place: Businesses can instantly capture them live from calls, emails, chats, etc.

Respond to feedback at scale to create brand advocates

According to Think Impact, 67% of churn is preventable if the customer’s problem is resolved and responded to quickly.​ Customers who experience a quick and satisfactory resolution to their problems are more likely to become advocates for the brand; even those who had left a negative review are happy to modify or delete those reviews if their issues are addressed. 90% of consumers are willing to recommend a brand after a positive interaction, highlighting the powerful impact of effective issue resolution on word-of-mouth marketing.

Let’s go back to the scenario earlier. Imagine if the store manager called you personally to apologise after you had voiced the unpleasant experience at the store.

On your next visit, you were greeted with a warm smile and a genuine welcome. An associate quickly and attentively checked stock for different sizes, making helpful suggestions and ensuring you found exactly what you needed.

You leave the store with a positive experience you’ll share with friends and family.

Effective CX workflow management and process flow tools enable businesses to address customer issues with ways to improve customer interaction that make a difference. Here are the key ways to act or respond to feedback at scale with AI:

• Prioritise high-risk feedback: An AI-driven platform can detect urgent issues and escalate them to the appropriate team for immediate action, especially from customers at risk of churn.
  • Identify loyal customers: AI helps identify loyal customers so retailers can give special attention to their feedback, as their continued satisfaction is crucial for long-term business success.
  • Personalise feedback handling: AI enhances CX workflow management by enabling retailers to design and implement responses at scale.
  • Monitor and adjust responses: AI helps do the heavy work so retailers can focus on monitoring the effectiveness of the responses using AI analytics and adjusting strategies based on real-time data to improve future interactions and outcomes if needed.

Discover strategic insights and recommendations

AI-powered CXM platforms, like Resonate CX, excel in discovering insights from customer feedback. When feedback is received, the platform identifies critical issues, performs root cause analysis, and prioritises them based on sentiment analysis.

Resonate CX’s AI analytics tags topics and themes to identify which drivers are working and which areas need improvement. Sifting through a large volume of unstructured data, the platform uses AI to identify at-risk feedback and alert users of issues before they escalate.

AI also provides strategic recommendations for senior management. The outer loop of the feedback process involves analysing overall trends and identifying key drivers of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction. AI compares data points like Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and specific driver scores to provide comprehensive insights.

Make improvements across the organisation

The ultimate goal of any CX initiative is improvement. From frontline staff making immediate adjustments to executives crafting long-term strategies, AI ensures that improvements are well-informed and effectively executed.

These insights inform day-to-day operations and strategic decisions, allowing senior management to focus on areas most significantly impacting customer satisfaction and business performance.

By using AI with VoC initiatives, companies can go beyond surface-level metrics to deeply understand and respond to customer needs.

At Resonate.CX, we break the CXM framework down into a four-step journey: 

Listen, Act, Discover, and Improve, also known as the closed-loop feedback system. We have products/features for each part of the loop. The Resonate.CX platform is an AI-powered CXM platform that fully automates, analyses, and emphasises feedback to bring critical feedback to attention.

Through role-specific dashboards, summaries are shown, and smart insights are also revealed in the Frontline CX Gym to show wins and losses with tailored AI coaching and smart insights.

Embracing AI for a customer-centric retail strategy

With the rapid adoption of AI in the retail industry, integrating the most vital customer-centric approach by enabling the voice of the customer reigns superior.

Moreover, AI-driven VoC initiatives enable personalised customer journeys focused on improvements that resonate with customers. Thanks to AI’s speed and precision, retailers can act on critical feedback that would go unnoticed.

Overall, AI-native CXM platforms like Resonate.CX equips retailers to meet modern consumers’ high expectations for service and engagement. As businesses continue to harness the power of AI, they unlock the potential to satisfy customers and delight them with today’s growing expectations of consumers.

As we end this article, we realise that the AI advantage ultimately boils down to this: empowering retailers to transform every customer interaction into an opportunity for growth and loyalty, ensuring that every customer’s voice is heard, understood, and meaningfully acted upon.

To discover more about the AI-native CXM platform, visit www.resonate.cx