Like baseball and apple pie, retail is a staple of American culture and a major component of our economy. From mom-and-pop shops to massive chains of giant stores, these places sell just about anything. This is even more true today where companies like Amazon have moved retail into a hybrid environment.
Between stores, online platforms, and warehouses, communication often becomes fragmented for retail organizations. Each location serves a different function and has different needs, meaning communication is rarely, if ever, consistent. This can cause significant communication breakdowns regarding scheduling, deliveries, and more.
Not only does this hamper collaboration, but it can also cause problems for the customer experience. Inconsistent communication means an inconsistent customer experience, which reduces overall satisfaction. This is true for both brick-and-mortar stores and online retailers.
Another reality of retail is a high turnover rate. For most employees, retail jobs are transitory, not to mention seasonal. Summers tend to bring an influx of new hires, all needing to be trained to use whatever systems the store relies on. If they aren’t adequately trained to use the systems and platforms in the store’s environment, problems will arise.
Then there are problems that come from a lack of visibility. Inventory and customer experience data are critical to running a retail organization, but serious problems arise if they aren’t easy to access or properly managed. In the digital age, this data should be automatically collected and accessible at a moment’s notice.
That’s what UCaaS and CCaaS solution aim to resolve.
With cloud-based platforms, UCaaS and CCaaS provide flexible, scalable, efficient, and easy-to-use solutions for any organization’s environment. This is especially true for retail, where solutions from Microsoft, Cisco, Genesys, and more provide major benefits for both customers and employees.
Unified communications make collaboration between coworkers and interactions with customers consistent across all locations. It streamlines collaboration and can enable much more effective cross-coordination between employees at different stores and warehouses.
Omnichannel contact centers provide this benefit to customers. More consistency and transparency make for an altogether more satisfying experience. The omnichannel nature of these solutions reduces customer effort and resolves their issues much faster. CCaaS solutions such as Genesys’ Cloud GX also provide automation and AI features that make life easier for employees and enable 24/7 customer service.
UCaaS and CCaaS also make it much easier to train new users. Zoom, a leader in the UC space, is well-known for its user-friendly interface, and many other UC platforms are just as intuitive. If that isn’t the case, most come with built-in tutorials, while others such as Microsoft Teams provide a vast library of on-demand training material.
Contact centers may take extra training time, as customer service is a more complex beast, but users of the UC platform should be ready to go in a matter of hours. Assuming the storefront has more turnover than the customer service department, this is incredibly valuable.
Both UCaaS and CCaaS are also highly scalable and flexible. These platforms streamline the process of adding and removing users, making it much easier to stay on top of major seasonal changes. Platforms like Teams, Zoom, Cloud GX, and C4 make it simple to add hundreds or even thousands of new users during the holidays. It's then just as simple to remove them when they're ready to leave.
The greatest benefit UCaaS and CCaaS provide retailers with is customer data and inventory management. CCaaS solutions especially are known for high-level CRM integration, giving customer service agents unfettered access to every previous customer interaction. Since these platforms are omnichannel, this remains consistent with calls, emails, text messages, and any other means by which customers may contact the store.
On top of CRM, CCaaS solutions integrate with inventory management software such as NetSuite and SAP to provide real-time insight into the organization’s supply chain. This helps agents inform customers what items are available, when restocks are scheduled, and where deliveries are in the process.
Retail can be a stressful business, which is why UCaaS and CCaaS help take the stress away.
There are so many solutions to choose from when it comes to UCaaS and CCaaS such as Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex, Zoom, Five9, Genesys, and more. Which one should you choose? Which best fits your environment?
Sometimes determining and integrating the proper solution can be challenging. That’s why there are expert partners like Continuant. At Continuant, we’ve been helping organizations large and small deploy the right solutions to get the most out of their communications for 28 years.
We’re well-versed in UC platforms and have even designed our own omnichannel contact center called C4. Built with open APIs, it’s a flexible, robust platform like those you’d expect from Genesys and Five9.
Plus, we have a vast backlog of experience with analog and legacy devices. If your stores and warehouses still rely on intercoms or door phones, we can make sure they run at peak efficiency and find ways to integrate them with your UCaaS and CCaaS solutions.
That’s exactly how we helped our friends at REI. When the time came for them to replace their Toshiba phones with a new Cisco solution, we provided an innovative solution that saved the company thousands.
After that, we helped them deploy new meeting rooms at their distribution center, fully integrated with the new solution to provide a consistent experience across the entire organization.
However sprawling and multifaceted your retail empire may be, we’re ready and willing to get you the solution you need.