Contact Centers

For years, brands have assessed the return on investment of customer experience automation by asking three questions: What does it cost to serve a customer today? What could it cost to serve a customer tomorrow? What is the investment price to get from A to B? With these questions guiding the way, we’ve seen a…

We’ve all experienced awkward, bad or just plain cringe-worthy customer experience situations — both with human and automated interactions. Maybe it’s the interactive voice response (IVR) system that makes you listen to an endless array of options. It could be the chatbot that just doesn’t understand your question and offers completely irrelevant answers. It might…

The end-of-year holiday season brings an extra layer of stress to the retail industry contact center agent’s work, and even if that stress diminishes after Christmas Day, the reprieve is short. Christmas quickly becomes New Year’s, then Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, and so on. In our consumer-driven culture, the “holiday sale”…

In this episode of Total Retail Tech Insights, Editor-in-Chief Joe Keenan interviews Shannon Flanagan, vice president and general manager of retail and consumer goods at Talkdesk, a global cloud contact center leader for enterprises of all sizes. Listen in as Flanagan discusses her experience in the industry (0:45), her career journey to Talkdesk and the…

The months after the holiday season can be chaotic due to a flurry of returns, accompanied with the pressure to meet new sales goals and start the year off strong. This year, retailers anticipate an approximate $25 billion in fraudulent return claims, representing approximately 16.5 percent of the total returns during this period. For retailers…

'Tis the season to start shopping. For retailers, this means delivering stellar customer service at every step of the customer journey. Salesforce data shows that 94 percent of consumers say good service makes them more likely to buy again while 80 percent will abandon a brand after three bad experiences. But rather than wait for the “three strikes…

Ever since ChatGPT was released near the end of 2022, organizations and decision makers have been scrambling to figure out how they can use the new generation of artificial intelligence (AI) technology to work better, faster and more effectively. Customer service delivery is no exception. It really does feel like a breakthrough moment for technology,…

Contact center analytics are vital to improving the retail customer experience. As data flows in, customer experience leaders are flooded with information that can be hard to understand. For businesses to move forward, there are six essential contact center analytics they must efficiently collect, understand, and use to improve operations and the customer experience. 1.…

While the holidays are a joyous season for most of us, they can feel like a lump of coal for retail contact center agents. Between Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the Christmas rush, retail contact centers are bombarded with calls from customers making returns, asking questions about products, or not-so-politely complaining. This spike in volume…

According to Mastercard SpendingPulse, in-store sales are anticipated to increase 7.9 percent this holiday shopping season, with an estimated 4.2 percent increase in online sales. A survey by Deloitte predicts an even stronger e-commerce increase of between 12.8 percent and 14.3 percent. This growth points to an expected increase in shoppers contacting retailers for different…