Customer Service Reps

The pandemic and resulting economic slowdown has been devastating to retailers. Supply chain disruptions, spending cuts, and labor shortages have all contributed to retail woes. While things have gotten tougher for retailers, customers haven’t gotten more forgiving. According to Zendesk's 2022 Customer Experience Trends, just one bad customer experience can drive consumers to shop elsewhere.…

With recent research showing three out of four consumers prefer communicating with chatbots, it’s no surprise that retail stores want to improve their digital experience. In fact, Gartner predicts 25 percent of enterprises across the globe will have a digital assistant to handle support issues, and it further supports two-thirds of customers who would prefer solving…

Selecting the right customer service outsourcing partner is key to success. Cost and customer experience are likely at the forefront of your mind as you solicit support, but security should be as high of a priority to consider in the decision-making process. Cyber attackers are getting smarter, which means retailers also have to weigh risks…

Managing an efficient customer service team is a challenge, even in relatively quiet times. However, the job gets far more complex when a crisis hits. Managers can foresee some fluctuations in staffing — like during the holidays — but the true test of a retail service center’s strategies comes when an unexpected event forces the…

While the explosive growth of digital shopping in 2020 led to more sales, it also caused a spike in returns as shoppers discovered some of their online purchases didn’t fit, were defective, or failed to meet expectations. For most retailers, an influx of returns expose costly operational weaknesses for processing returns, as well as untapped…

The interactive voice response (IVR) system has been with us for the better part of a century, with its origins dating back to the 1930s. Today’s IVRs do more than let consumers complete a range of routine tasks like checking product availability or store hours. Where brands have embraced conversational artificial intelligence (AI), they’ve found…

The convenience of online shopping is indisputable — and it continues to give brick-and-mortar retail a run for its money. While 2021 saw a rise in brick-and-mortar retail as a result of lifted pandemic restrictions and vaccine availability, e-commerce sales still grew at nearly three times the rate of brick-and-mortar. But digital retail does not…

Now that the 2021 holiday shopping season is behind us, and returns are in full force, many of the challenges for the retail industry (and opportunities) for the new year remain. These include supply chain disruptions, empty shelves, the Great Resignation, widespread web outages, and more. It’s not unreasonable to think that many customers may…

Off the heels of the busy holiday season, digital consumers are continuing to rewrite the rules of retail in 2022. To keep up with evolving demands, the industry will see the rise of a “digital workforce.” A digital workforce is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) and can work alongside retailers’ sales and service reps to…

In order to delight customers in a post-pandemic world, retailers must optimize an increasingly delicate balance between technology and a human touch. The bar for personalized experiences continues to rise, with 95 percent of shoppers adamant that they don't want to talk to a robot, and 84 percent say being “treated like a person and…