As the digital age reshapes the way consumers shop, retailers face the critical challenge of meeting ever-rising expectations for personalized, fast, and seamless customer experiences. Incisiv and Talkdesk have released a report highlighting how well-leading retailers satisfy customer expectations.
The 2024 Retail Customer Experience (CX) Index emphasizes the importance of retailers improving their support and engagement skills to meet rising consumer demands for hyper-personalized, rapid, and convenient customer care across a wide range of retail categories.
“Our findings reveal that while retailers have made significant strides in customer experience, there remains a critical gap between consumer expectations and what is currently being delivered. Retailers must accelerate their adoption of advanced technologies, particularly AI and automation, to deliver the hyper-personalized, efficient service today’s consumers demand. This index is a crucial benchmark for retailers to understand where they stand and what steps they need to take to enhance their customer engagement strategies,” said Dave Weinand, chief customer officer at Incisiv.
According to the index, the retail sector's overall maturity in delivering customer experience is relatively low, with only 34% of all shops able to personalize one-third of the customer journey. While many shops try to stay up with the latest technological advancements, there are still gaps between capacity adoption and customer expectations.
On the bright side, the index shows that as brands focus more on enhancing their customer experience initiatives, their maturity levels have gradually improved.
Increase in personalization and virtual assistants
The adoption of AI-powered virtual assistants has increased dramatically, from 38% in 2022 to 59% in 2024. In addition, personalized recommendations from support agents have skyrocketed, increasing by more than 80% from 27% in 2022 to 49% in 2024.
The report showed that the home furnishings industry leads in CX maturity, with a 40% adoption rate, making it 1.4 times more mature than other sectors. In contrast, the watch category has a significantly lower adoption rate of only 28%.
The index also assessed retailers' skills in areas such as engagement strategies, individualized customer experiences, and dispute-resolution procedures.
Key highlights
Apparel retailers are leaders in customer engagement methods, utilizing text messaging, voice communication, and omnichannel live chat to greatly increase consumer encounters
Industries such as luxury and home furnishing outperform others in terms of advanced customer care capabilities, including services such as chat-based checkout and chat-based order revisions and returns.
Moreover, luxury retailers excel in providing personalized experiences and assistance with shopping, such as targeted product recommendations, one-on-one appointment scheduling, and relevant advertising while on hold.
