Customer Service

Today's digital age has become impersonal.  Sure, we still get greeted online and retailers know our preferences thanks to cookies, but the human element is gone for sure. Within this impersonal, digital world we live in, however, there are huge opportunities for retailers to step back and become more personal. Consider the following customer service tips as you prepare for the busy holiday shopping season: 

Vintage Marquee Lights (VML), a Myrtle Beach, S.C.-based retailer of marquee lights available in letters, numbers and symbols, converted its website visitors into Facebook fans and brand ambassadors as well as drove customer acquisition thanks to a social commerce program it implemented this past spring.

In line with its usual philosophy of extreme customer service, Zappos has introduced a new service that can help consumers track down any fashion item — even if the company doesn't sell it. Called Ask Zappos, the service provides a digital personal assistant who takes requests in the form of images and finds the exact item, while also providing links to some alternatives. Zappos has been testing the service since the beginning of June, but started promoting Ask Zappos on its mobile homepage last week.

Kohl's department store is opening a customer service operations center this week in Dallas and plans to employ 1,500 people in four years. The center has a health care clinic, an idea that more companies are adopting to increase productivity. It also has an on-site cafe. The Wisconsin-based retailer said it's hiring full- and part-time workers at the 240,000-square-foot facility.

Deliv CEO Daphne Carmeli calls the startup she founded two-and-a-half years ago a disrupter for the retail world, and as CEO she's entitled to boast. But Carmeli isn't that far off in her description of a service that, with a few tweaks and twists, can be likened to a far more famous disrupter — rideshare services Uber and Lyft. Deliv is a crowdsourced delivery service used by retailers like Williams-Sonoma and a growing number of malls owned by such companies as General Growth Properties and Simon Property Group. 

How small retailers (both online and brick-and-mortar) can compete with Amazon and its vast resources, cheap pricing and fast delivery.

How do you compete if you can’t offer same-day delivery? Doug Sternberg offers his expert thoughts in this webinar.

Join us for this fast-paced session covering advanced strategies retailers can use to optimize your email marketing performance.

Listen as we map out simple customer service best practices you can implement today, and keep customers coming back time and again.

Last year, 61 percent of retailers cited customer retention as their greatest obstacle. It's easy to view e-commerce innovations as the enemy when a once-faithful customer base abandons brand loyalty in favor of the cheaper or faster option. But these challenges offer retailers opportunities to take a hard look at existing loyalty programs and business strategies to make updates that better suit the changing behaviors of their target markets. Here are five methods retailers can use to grow customer loyalty in today's digital age: