Since the world got hit by the Covid19 pandemic, consumer habits and preferences changed eventually. Businesses now need to rethink their strategies and marketing campaign styles to win over the upcoming holiday/sale season. As the year 2021 precedes 2020, it brings along challenges to recover from past years' losses market-wise. Only brands and companies who can manage to shift their focuses on improving and delivering personalized customer experience will be able to achieve new pinnacles of success.

Taking hints from the most appreciated brand name in terms of delivering the best quality customer experience we can’t miss out on Amazon.com, their exceptionally fast deliveries, a wide range of products, well maintained and phenomenal customer services, are key drivers of their overall success. Amazon introduced Amazon Prime Day back in 2015 and since then, it became so popular that consumers look forward to it eagerly. Even during the pandemic, they were able to drive a 42% weekly lift in sales, which was only marginally off from past years' numbers. This is a great example for brands that wish to survive the onslaught successfully.

By providing a seamless, hassle-free, safe, and easy shopping experience along with a great customer experience, it is the only way for brands to get ahead of the competition and make the best out of the holiday sale season. Now more than ever, it is of utmost importance to invest in building a great shopping platform, provide convenient digital ordering experience, and quick product delivery, it is also important to focus on building the most efficient and responsive customer service teams to win customer loyalty. As we’ve already seen with Amazon Prime Day, it pays back good to invest and focus on strategies that help perk up customer loyalty and gain grounds with positive customer experience scores, even during the worst of times.

Fact check: 31% of Prime Day buyers said they wouldn't have made the purchase if it weren't for Prime Day. Another 33% said that it was cannibalistic - they would have bought it on Amazon despite the sale. Another 5% said they made a purchase on Amazon that otherwise would have gone to a different retailer. Overall, Prime Day drove 36% incremental sales.

Let’s talk about ways to improve and offer a better customer experience in 2021

Finding the balance between technology and personalized human interactions is the first and foremost step towards meeting customer expectations. It is the right time to understand the customer mindset that requires a more empathetic and personalized shopping experience. Interacting with customers through pre-drafted and pre-scripted dialects is so in 2020. Now customers demand more attention to their queries and faster resolutions. Especially if you want to compete with pre-dominant brands during the sale season, you need to step up and improve your customer interactions. A well-managed customer is a happy customer and happy customers offer loyalty, which is the most important for any business to thrive.

According to Isabella Mongalo, (director of digital solutions for Sitel Group, “The right balance, and seamless integration between tech and the human touch, is important for brand success throughout the rest of the year, and beyond,” she added “Brands should re-evaluate their customer base, how their consumers prefer to interact and how this has changed during the pandemic.”

Investing in better Customer Experience Management platforms is another important factor that can help you gain actionable insights from your pre-existing or new customers. Ensuring the fact that your customer feels they are heard, and their words are respected can help brands in boosting their experience. CRM platforms can assist you with data and details about how exactly your customer feels about your offers, products, customer services, etc. while also giving you a competitive advantage. Now the competition between brands is fiercer, there is a great need for providing better customer experience; more and more businesses are adopting CRM platforms customized according to their business requirements.

Voice of the customer is vital to comprehend, at Dropthought we believe that to win your customer's loyalty and to build a sustainable relationship with them, we must value customer feedback. We believe in building a situation based and feedback centric client engagement plan that will not only help businesses to leverage the data collected abundantly but also if done right this can turn into a long-lasting opportunity to keep your customers intact and keep the revenue bar up and running during and beyond holiday sale seasons. Your customers can express their opinions through the surveys and provide suggestions about your customer service team, product quality, and more throughout their customer journey.

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