Customer Service

The back-to-school (BTS) shopping season is well underway — thanks in part to Amazon Prime Day — with 29 million households across the U.S. planning to spend a total of $27.6 billion on supplies in 2018. The BTS season is the second biggest shopping season of the year (after the holiday shopping season, which brought in…

We’ve all been there. You’ve just entered a store to make a quick purchase. Your head is down in an attempt to avoid speaking with any overzealous retail associates. But it’s too late, they’ve found you. What do you do to avoid this conversation? Lie, of course. Voice of customer platform Usabilla surveyed 2,000 U.S. consumers…

To make the most out of this holiday season, Alliance Data’s 2018 Holiday Retail Outlook report suggests retailers need to leverage loyalty during the holidays and beyond, understand that the customer is the only channel that matters, and must maximize mobile micro-shopping moments. The report also reveals that shoppers expect in-the-moment customer service, therefore retailers must optimize the in-store experience to take advantage of this trend.

It wasn’t long ago that running out of a key ingredient for dinner meant rushing to the market, hoping for a short line, and getting home in time to get the food on the table. Just a few years ago, shopping for something more personal, like a watch, took you to every jewelry store in…

We’re all guilty of yelling at Alexa or Siri. From sharp commands to making our virtual assistant the brunt of our jokes, niceties fall by the wayside when we interact with technology. Why? Because giving technology a human name doesn’t make it human. It still lacks the ability to feel the sting of our annoyance…

In the big business of retail, “authenticity” is starting to become a meaningless buzzword. Executives, marketers and creative agencies like to toss the concept across giant conference tables in hopes of hooking a generation of consumers. Leaders of the world’s biggest retail chains are constantly attempting to connect with shoppers through lower costs and greater convenience, but too many of them are missing the mark on a far more fundamental human need.

Learn how the right e-commerce platform impacts multiple business areas, from supply chain to customer service and more!

There are multiple departments within a retail organization, so which are most important? If we’re equating worth to cost — i.e., the annual salaries of employees within each department — then supply chain executives are most critical (see chart below). This was just one of the findings of Total Retail's recently released 2018 Salary Benchmark Report,…

Retailers face a number of challenges, including competition from nimble e-commerce upstarts and increasingly impatient customers. The industry is recognizing that as the needs of the modern consumer change, the customer experience they offer needs to evolve with it. A large part of that evolution has been the shift to omnichannel support. Omnichannel solutions allow retailers…

This report from customer engagement and analytics software provider Calabrio includes responses from more than 3,000 consumers in the U.S. and U.K. about the customer experience journey, and what motivates them. The findings are clear: human nature is how customers think, feel and act — and it drives their digital behavior. To gain their loyalty, customers should feel heard and have an emotional attachment to the brand, and that can only be created through the human connection.