Customer Pain Points in Omnichannel Jewellery Retailing

Customer-centricity is the key to omnichannel success. As brick-and-mortar Jewellery retailers make their transition into omnichannel retail, they often fall short in meeting demanding customer expectations. A closer understanding of the customer pain points in omnichannel jewellery retailing would help Jewellers step up their efforts in delivering seamless customer experience.

Leading Online marketplaces such as Amazon & Flipkart have set higher benchmarks for customer service by delivering a friction-less online shopping experience.

In this digital age, customers frequently share their happy and unhappy experiences on review platforms as well as the brand’s social media pages. Jewellers who are unable to adapt to sophisticated technologies and revamp existing customer service levels risk losing their customers to competitors.

Pain Points of a Jewellery Customer

The below chart lists the pain points of a jewellery customer through pre-sale, sale, and post-sale stages. Brick-and-mortar jewellers expanding into Omnichannel retail must address customer pain points related to offline, online, and omnichannel sales.

Top 3 Critical Pain Points of an Online Jewellery Customer

Below are the top 3 critical pain points and how omnichannel Jewellers can fix them

1. Delayed delivery

Fast shipping and timely delivery are the most critical requirements for online retailing. While long delivery time causes lost sales, delayed delivery significantly reduces the chances of repeat sales. Even loyal customers tend to lose trust in the Jeweller after multiple instances of delayed delivery.

Since customers might order jewellery for celebrating an important occasion like birthday, engagement, anniversary, or Mother’s Day, missing the delivery date can completely ruin the customer experience. This usually results in the loss of customers as well as bad reviews that impact new customer acquisition.

Jewellers need to take multiple steps such as setting realistic delivery timelines, maintaining updated inventory levels, and multiple delivery partners to avoid delivery delays.

2. Real-time Customer service

This is the most critical pain point for the post-sale stage of the customer journey. Today’s customers are demanding and impatient. They expect a proactive response for any possible delay in delivery and want prompt problem resolution. A common frustration of customers is following up on their queries. They hate it when customer service agents promise to get back with a solution and never revert. This often results in negative customer reviews on social media pages.

Digital savvy customers also prefer the fastest mediums of interaction such as web chat, email, or even social media to raise their queries and they don’t like direct calling and being put on hold.

Real-time and proactive customer service can turn unhappy customers into happy customers and cover-up any potential damage to the brand

Companies need to invest in advance systems that provide a unified view of customers and visibility on shipment status across their sales channels. If a customer buys online and comes to the store for a query resolution, the store staff should be able to access the customer details and address the issue promptly. Directing the customer to call the customer care number would bring down the customer experience.

3. Easier Return / Exchange / Refunds Policy

Easier return reduces the risk of shopping for online customers. There would be genuine cases such as customers not liking the product, size mismatch, defective product, etc. In such cases, if the customer is being charged a deduction for return, it not only upsets the customer but significantly reduces the chance of the customer coming back in the future.

Jewellers need to accept in-store return for items bought online. It’s a key part of the omnichannel experience. It also increases the chance of customers considering an exchange with another product when they return items in the store

Jewellers need to design systems for processing faster refunds to customers. They need to look at refunds as an investment in building customer retention and satisfaction.

Conclusion

“It is seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.”

Inability to address these omnichannel pain points not only impacts the customer experience but also exposes a Jewellery brand to the risk of negative online reviews. In this digital age, a negative review on a brand’s social media page can have a long-lasting negative effect. It can damage a brand’s credibility and impact its ability to attract new customers.

Omnichannel Jewellers would need to make the customer experience one of their top priorities and address these pain points to significantly reduce their customer complaints and increase customer retention rates.

Courtesy: Deepak Tulsian

Image Courtesy: Retail ET