Contact Centers

From one-click purchases to door-to-door same-day delivery, retail has led the charge in convenience. But even as retailers perfect their omnichannel experiences, they’re facing a critical challenge in one of the oldest, tried-and-true communication methods: the phone call. Calls that once delivered order confirmations, pickup reminders, or fraud alerts are now going unanswered. The culprit…

Retailers today face relentless pressure to meet rising customer expectations while managing shrinking margins. In this environment, the contact center is a strategic engine for brand differentiation and loyalty where every interaction is compared with the customer’s last best conversation. And the key to unlocking its full potential lies in how retailers harness contact center…

A call center is vital to an organization’s relationship with its customers. For many businesses, it serves as the primary touchpoint for customer interactions. As such, optimizing your call center’s efficiency, accessibility and reliability is critical to delivering exceptional customer experiences. However, modern customer service extends far beyond traditional phone calls. While the term “call…

As the holiday shopping season gathers pace, retailers are working extra hard to satisfy increased customer demand. There’s a strong emphasis on in-store teams, but contact center agents are also critical, serving as the touchpoint between retail brands and millions of customers grappling with online order issues, delivery delays and other complex questions. Artificial intelligence…

For years, brands have assessed the return on investment of customer experience automation by asking three questions: What does it cost to serve a customer today? What could it cost to serve a customer tomorrow? What is the investment price to get from A to B? With these questions guiding the way, we’ve seen a…

We’ve all experienced awkward, bad or just plain cringe-worthy customer experience situations — both with human and automated interactions. Maybe it’s the interactive voice response (IVR) system that makes you listen to an endless array of options. It could be the chatbot that just doesn’t understand your question and offers completely irrelevant answers. It might…

The end-of-year holiday season brings an extra layer of stress to the retail industry contact center agent’s work, and even if that stress diminishes after Christmas Day, the reprieve is short. Christmas quickly becomes New Year’s, then Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and so on. In our consumer-driven culture, the “holiday sale”…

In this episode of Total Retail Tech Insights, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Shannon Flanagan, vice president and general manager of retail and consumer goods at Talkdesk, a global cloud contact center leader for enterprises of all sizes. Listen in as Flanagan discusses her experience in the industry (0:45), her career journey to Talkdesk and the…

The months after the holiday season can be chaotic due to a flurry of returns, accompanied with the pressure to meet new sales goals and start the year off strong. This year, retailers anticipate an approximate $25 billion in fraudulent return claims, representing approximately 16.5 percent of the total returns during this period. For retailers…

'Tis the season to start shopping. For retailers, this means delivering stellar customer service at every step of the customer journey. Salesforce data shows that 94 percent of consumers say good service makes them more likely to buy again while 80 percent will abandon a brand after three bad experiences. But rather than wait for the “three strikes…