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Many national retailers began announcing their 2020 holiday season plans and shopping promotions much earlier than in years past. The holiday shopping season was particularly different considering the COVID-19-induced drastic shift from a traditional brick-and-mortar shopping experience to an even more robust online environment. While stores ponder their physical store operations, retailers understand that 2021…

Customer service has become a competitive differentiator for retailers — on par with quality and price. When a person reaches out to a company with a question or issue, the experience has an immediate and direct impact on whether they will do business with a company again — now or in the future. Retailers like…

Like everything else last year, retail brands were forced to learn to live with a new reality. Since the beginning of the pandemic, as consumers adapted to quarantines, social distancing and masks, they also adapted how they interact with brands. More than ever before, they took to conversational artificial intelligence (AI) — the technology that…

In this episode of Retail Right Now, Total Retail's Joe Keenan and Kristina Stidham discuss an article recently published by Total Retail titled, “5 CX Trends to Help You Win Customers’ Hearts and Wallets in 2021,” authored by Jean Shin, director of strategy and content at tyntec. The article discusses how in 2020, we learned…

In today’s retail world, the reality is that everything can change within months, weeks or even a day. While creating an effective customer self-service portal has long been a priority for many, recent world events have made it infinitely more imperative. We’re talking, of course, about the COVID-19 public health crisis. The pandemic has affected…

The holiday shopping season is upon us, and it could be make-or-break for many retailers after a challenging year. This year, 71 percent of U.S. adults will purchase more than half of their holiday gifts online. Online retail will be more important than ever for the 2020 holiday season, as many consumers hesitate to leave the…

More than 6,300 U.S. stores are expected to close in 2020 amid a pandemic and ongoing changes to the brick-and-mortar model. Among them are some of the longest-running brands in retail, including Lord & Taylor, Victoria’s Secret, and Brooks Brothers. In order to re-stimulate the sector, retailers are mixing in digital solutions to create memorable…

After years of steady growth, COVID-19 has massively accelerated e-commerce penetration. According to an eMarketer report, U.S. e-commerce sales will jump by 18 percent this year due to the impact of the pandemic. This increase in sales has obviously been a relief for retailers, but it’s also brought with it something less profitable and more…

There’s no doubt that recent circumstances surrounding COVID-19 have reshaped the way retailers operate and connect with their customers daily. Shelter-in-place ordinances and stay-at-home mandates have forced retail brands to rely on artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and chatbot technology to manage much of the workload required for servicing their customers’ needs. In fact,…

This past quarter, retailers discovered what happens when a robust omnichannel strategy is forced down to one storefront: digital. Players in every industry have accelerated their timelines and poured resources into their online experience, and are learning as they go. We see firsthand the strain our own customers are feeling as they stare down a…