Retailers See Need to Improve Social Engagement

BOSTON — Although social media can be an opportunity to create a personalized customer shopping experience, 81 percent of retailers using the platform to engage with customers indicated the need to improve their methods, according to Boston Retail Partners' (BRP) latest special report, Enhancing Customer Engagement Through Social Media.

"Social media provides retailers with unprecedented visibility into their customer base. It provides a venue where retailers can directly communicate with their customers and it can be an extremely powerful tool for collecting and using customer insights to improve planning decisions," said Brian Brunk, principal at BRP. "Retailers can understand who the customer is, what she wants, when and where she wants it, and even why she wants it based on social media postings and feedback."

The report identifies five key areas where retailers should utilize social media to improve their customer engagement:

• Experience. Sixty-nine percent of retailers see opportunities to utilize social media to enhance the customer experience.
• Interaction. Seventy-five percent of retailers support customer interaction via social media.
• Endorsement. Fifty-nine percent of retailers plan to utilize brand advocacy/social media endorsement as a source to identify their most valuable customers within three years.
• Satisfaction. Fifty-nine percent of retailers utilize social media comments as a means of measuring customer satisfaction.
• Insight. Sixty-percent of retailers capture customer feedback and insights through social media and online comments.

BRP's special report provides insight into the firm’s 2016 Customer Experience/Unified Commerce survey. The complete report can be found here.

Headquartered in Boston, Boston Retail Partners is a retail consulting firm that focuses on areas such as: point of sale, e-commerce, payment security, customer engagement, mobile strategies and more.