Gettin’ on that customer retention
Customer service has long been an important part of retailers’ businesses as a way to bolster customer retention. In 2015, research found most US retail executives agreed that customer service and support drove customer retention.
From the store to the web
Luxury brands are now also jumping on the customer service bandwagon. Luxury brands have notoriously been slow in taking their marketing efforts digital.
Many of the brands feared they just couldn’t match the caliber of impressive experiences on the internet that they typically gave customers in person.
Regardless, luxury brands are now catching up to their brick-and-mortar stores. It seems these brands are recognizing the increasing importance of customer service and have started incorporating service-oriented features into their websites in the last few years.
Investing in the customer experience
This insight comes from a recent survey by L2 Think Tank. The company conducted a survey of over 69 brands for their “Digital IQ Index: Fashion 2015” report. Among the findings is that in 2015, 76% of US luxury brands’ sites had a product quick view feature. This was way up from the 19% of brands that offered such a feature in 2013.
Their investment in customer service doesn’t stop there. The survey found that FAQs and geolocation services have also become more common in 2015. Some 71% have a FAQ page, up from 39% two years before, while almost half (46%) now have geolocation features to help match product to person.
While these are still only used by smaller subset of luxury brands, other customer service features like live chat on product pages, personal shoppers, and social logins also grew year over year.
Growing digital sales
Most likely, building up customer services offerings has been a response by luxury brands to quickly capitalize on growing digital sales.
While luxury brands were initially slow to go digital, they are now realizing how crucial customer service and support are, since purchases tend to be considered carefully by customers.
Among all retailers, another survey released in October found customer service is second only to e-mail in driving customer retention, with 53% of executives naming it among the marketing channels and tactics they use.
The surging popularity of adding customer service features is likely to be an ongoing trend for luxury brands.
