Editor's note: This article also appeared in Just Retail magazine.
Immersed in retail across a wide spectrum of products and services, TTEC enjoys unique visibility into the pain and pride merchants face every day.
Among the top-of-mind challenges Spanish retailers and brands across Europe are facing today include reducing the cost to serve, streamlining product returns, and maintaining a high-quality experience — delivered in customers’ native languages.
We talk to Ignacio Llanos, director, sales, EMEA, TTEC, whose clients range from French luxury goods retailers and European food purveyors to multinational chains selling everything from bikes to beverages and paint to pants. TTEC operates contact centres for more than 700 clients across six continents in more than 50 languages.
Q: What are Spanish brands focused on today and does that mirror concerns and priorities across all of Europe?
Llanos: There’s no simple answer but enhancing the customer experience is universal and there’s lots of ways to tackle that. In Spain and Portugal, retailers’ focuse is on Voice of the Customer, making the insights actionable, and proving a solid return on investment in VOC. Talk to someone in Germany and you’ll hear about AI and large language models (LLM) to improve the experience, detect fraudulent activity, and speed resolution times.
Efficiency is vital and retailers are looking to exploit automation, particularly for customer interactions that don’t require a human touch, such as self-service product returns processing, a big priority for one brand in Belgium we’re currently working on—and a huge opportunity for every retailer, whether brick-and-mortar or digital or omnichannel.
Q: What new opportunities are emerging that were not within reach even a few years ago?
Llanos: In a word: Expansion. There are new, cost-competitive options available that retailers did not have a short time ago. In the past, brands with Spanish-speaking customers generally chose contact centre locations based on language needs, with customer support sites typically onshore.
However, with the advancement of AI-enhanced, real-time language translation, retailers have far more options to consider locating contact centres in countries such as Colombia, Egypt or even Rwanda, where workers are skilled, digital-savvy, and more cost-effective than other geographies.
Q: What’s more important today: Reducing cost to serve or enhancing CX?
Llanos: They’re not mutually exclusive. Not by a long shot. Ask me why.
Q: Why?
Llanos: Real-time voice translation saves costs without sacrificing customer experience. They go hand in hand like Manchego and Tinto. Picture this: One multilingual associate augmented by AI, for instance, can do the work that previously required several bilingual associates. Companies, including one major retailer, are already seeing tools such as voice translation, accent softening and noise cancelation facilitate better and quicker resolutions.
Translation and accent softening tools, in particular, let brands hire from lower-cost talent pools such as India without worrying that language and accent barriers might hinder CX. They also eliminate the need for costly external translators. All the money saved on these labour costs can be invested in other parts of the business.
Q: How can retailers build loyalty when customer preferences across all generations, income levels, and cultures vary so widely?
Llanos: It’s all about your customer intents. If you can analyse interactions online, in person, via voice and chat, patterns and trends will begin to emerge. Then, apply AI to extract insights that guide business leaders to make informed decisions and align next steps to those customer intents.
For example, when a high-end retail client wanted a clearer picture of customer sentiment, we worked with our strategic partner LevelAI to help. We implemented our TTEC Insights solution, which includes LevelAI technology that listens to and analyses 100% of customer interactions across all customer support channels.
Using conversation AI revealed that 10% of interactions about product returns involved customers asking about return labels and 17% of those with returns enquiries were repeat contacts. Without visibility into these details, the retailer could have deployed solutions that seem logical but would make no impact on streamlining the process. With these insights about their own customers — not an aggregate — the retailer knew exactly where to focus to achieve the outcome they needed.
Q: Do returns really matter? Aren’t returns just a cost of doing business?
Llanos: Returns are extremely important. In this specific case, we identified €450,000 in annual savings. Money saved in one aspect of the operation can be invested in other customer-facing enhancements to improve the shopping journey at every touchpoint.
Looking beyond this one example, think about the many ways a smoother returns process pays dividends: By empowering customers to initiate the returns process at a time convenient to them, in their channel of choice through self-service options, you make it easy. Easy returns reduce customer churn and improve Net Promoter Scores (NPS) by converting detractors to active promoters.
When simple interactions can be offloaded and effectively handled by chatbots, IVRs, and autonomous agents, retailers can dedicate their human associates to interactions that require more care, nuance, and empathy. An expert CX partner that specializes in retail and e-commerce can point you to the best AI solutions and guide deployment.
