Customer Service

At Shoptalk in Las Vegas last month, Total Retail Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan spoke with Elina Vilk, president and chief business officer, and Lisa Horton, chief communications and creative officer at David's Bridal, the wedding technology company, media powerhouse, and marketplace platform. They discuss the bridal company's "Aisle to Algorithm" strategy, balancing the risks and rewards…

At Shoptalk in Las Vegas last month, Total Retail Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan spoke with Anna Haffner, senior director, large customer sales, retail at Reddit, a social network of communities where people can dive into their interests, hobbies and passions. They explore how Reddit’s massive collection of human conversations is transforming into a powerful retail engine.…

For years, retailers have understood something simple but powerful: consumers rarely begin their purchase journey on retailer websites. They start with research. Increasingly, that research happens on Reddit. According to the platform, 71 percent of people who discover a brand go on to research it there, while 74 percent say Reddit helps them make faster…

The search bar isn’t dead, but it’s no longer running the show. For years, retail marketing teams optimized content for search engines that crawled text and hunted for keywords. Now, generative artificial intelligence tools, including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, answer shoppers' questions directly, drawing from a much wider pool of user-generated signals. They determine which…

Retailers are operating in an increasingly unforgiving environment. Shoppers expect fast, personalized, and consistent service, while retail organizations are stretched thin by staffing shortages, rising costs, and ongoing supply chain volatility. In an on-demand culture, even minor service breakdowns — an unanswered question, a long wait, an out-of-stock item — can cause today’s transactional shopper…

We’re living in the era of “do not disturb.” Consumers mute notifications, skip ads, and unfollow brands without hesitation. Marketing channels are saturated and attention is strained. Trust is harder to earn because audiences are more selective about what they let in. Success in breaking through hinges on understanding the signals audiences are sending and…

If technology matures at a pace closer to dog years than human, then we’ve already witnessed a century of conversational intelligence since Siri first appeared on our iPhones 15 years ago. As ChatGPT and a constellation of other large language models (LLMs) continue to evolve at an exponential speed and scale, legacy interactive voice response…

When import thresholds shifted this summer, enterprise retailers faced sudden operational disruptions. Packages that previously entered the country duty-free began incurring tariffs and extra fees, leading to shipment delays, canceled orders, and frustrated customers. For large customer service teams, these changes meant responding to a surge of inquiries while maintaining accuracy, clarity and empathy. Events…

For years, retail marketers have measured influence in scale: follower counts, impressions, and reach. However, as the cost of influencer partnerships rises and trust in polished sponsorships declines, another form of influence is emerging. Welcome to the era of the neighborhood influencer. This is the suburban mom recommending her favorite contractor on Reddit, the local…

Holiday marketing is no longer just a three-day shopping sprint, but a three-month marathon requiring strategic planning, consistency and community stamina. Social commerce has collapsed awareness, consideration and purchase into a single scroll. Projected to account for 17 percent of total e-commerce sales by 2025, this shift demands a new playbook for social media managers,…