So, what can you do to help cut your losses? Start by equipping your service agents with tools that enable speedy, personalized experiences. With the right resources at their fingertips, service agents have the power to mitigate loss, save sales, and turn every return into an opportunity. Here’s how.
Keep shoppers coming back by reimagining your brand loyalty program.
When a customer’s chat history, account details, and order information are all visible in one dashboard, agents are also more likely to uncover new opportunities for cross-selling or find other ways to turn returns around.
All customers have experienced it: waiting on hold, frustrated, while a service agent processes a return at the speed of a snail. If customers could peek behind the curtain, however, they’d likely see the agent scrambling to get an approval from another team member, asking questions on their behalf, or tracking down data to get more insight into their order.
Retailers can leverage technology to intelligently surface relevant messages, files, channels, and people. With these collaborative commerce tools in hand, the agent becomes a trusted guide for the customer’s retail-return experience rather than an intermediary.
Ultimately, this helps your team understand why customers are returning things in the first place and gives you a roadmap for how to address specific issues. If you find that a particular item has a much higher return rate than others in your inventory, reason codes can help you determine whether to contact the supplier, adjust your workflow, or shift course in another way.
Connect your shoppers’ entire commerce experience — from marketing to fulfillment to retargeting.
This becomes particularly important for high-ticket items — especially when they are bulky and costly to return. For example, consider a home goods company that sells smart appliances. If service agents track a pattern of “difficult installation” as the main reason for returns, the retailer can disable self-service returns for the item. Now, an agent can step in to help guide the installation process and improve the setup experience.
See how order management tools can boost your success.
