Are retailers meeting customer expectations in a digital shopping environment?

Incisiv, in partnership with Talkdesk, released the 2024 Retail Customer Experience (CX) Index, offering a comprehensive assessment of how effectively top retailers meet customer expectations in an increasingly digital-first shopping environment. 

The report highlights the growing importance for retailers to provide differentiated support and engagement capabilities to meet growing consumer demand for hyper-personalization, speed and convenience in customer service across various retail segments.

The retail landscape is undergoing a dramatic transformation, driven by changing consumer behavior, global uncertainty and technological evolution. The 2024 Retail Customer Experience Index benchmarks customer service and engagement across 131 leading U.S. retailers and brands, covering 11 industry segments, including apparel, home furnishings, consumer electronics and luxury.

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Based on the index findings, retail's overall maturity in customer experience is on the lower end of the spectrum, with an average of 34% of all retailers personalizing just one-third of their shopper journey. While retailers are trying to keep pace with technology trends, gaps remain across capability adoption and customer expectations.

However, a bright spot emerged because as brands have prioritized customer experience strategies in recent years, maturity levels have trended upward.

Specific to customer experience technology adoption, index findings indicate:

• Artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant integration grew from 38% in 2022 to 59% in 2024.
• Personalized recommendations by support agents grew more than 80%, from 27% in 2022 to 49% in 2024.
• The home furnishings segment leads in retail CX maturity. With an adoption rate of 40%, it is 1.4 times more mature than other segments. The watch category, on the other hand, has an adoption rate of only 28%.

 The 2024 Retail Customer Experience Index examined and assessed retailers’ capabilities across engagement methods, personalized experiences and resolution mechanisms. Highlights of index findings include:

• Apparel, followed by luxury retailers, leads in the adoption of customer engagement strategies. Apparel retailers are at the forefront of customer interaction by effectively utilizing text messaging, voice communication and an omnichannel live chat experience to enhance customer engagement significantly.
• Luxury and home furnishing retailers outperform others in providing advanced customer support capabilities, such as offering the ability to checkout using chat services and chat agent support on order modifications and returns.
• Luxury retailers lead in providing personalized experiences and assisted shopping services. These include personalized product recommendations, the ability to schedule one-to-one appointments and providing relevant ads while on hold.
• Luxury and home furnishing retailers outperform others in providing advanced customer support capabilities.

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Detailed information about retailer adoption rates of customer experience technologies across different segments and the brands leading the way in customer experience excellence can be found in the full 2024 Retail Customer Experience Index.