Dive Brief:
- Luxury brands have built up their online customer service offerings quickly to capitalize on growing digital sales, according to a survey from benchmarking firm L2 Think Tank.
- Features such as product quick view, FAQs, and geolocation have surged in popularity among luxury marketers with an online presence.
Dive Insight:
While luxury brands were initially slow to go digital, some are catching up with the very thing that makes their brick-and-mortar stores stand out: customer service. A survey of 69 luxury retailers from L2 Think Tank found that service-oriented website features have grown in the last few years.
Only 19% of luxury brands’ sites had a product quick view feature in 2013; two years later, 76% do. 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 still used by less than one-fifth of luxury sites, live chat, personal shoppers, and social logins have also grown their presence.
Customer service and support are crucial to luxury brands, where 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.