Customer Service Reps

With unprecedented worker shortages coupled with a surplus of inventory, retailers are bracing for a challenging start to the new year. While Black Friday discounts (that seem to creep earlier and earlier before Thanksgiving every year) incentivize consumers to a certain extent, many retailers are finding themselves strapped for customer service and sales staff —…

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.…

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…

Rising prices, ballooning interest rates, and fresh memories of last year’s supply chain shortages — these are a few of the factors pushing holiday retail spending earlier than ever before. In fact, a recent Bankrate survey showed that half of consumers planned on starting their holiday shopping by Oct. 31. This stands in stark contrast…

The pandemic and resulting economic slowdown has been devastating to retailers. Supply chain disruptions, spending cuts, and labor shortages have all contributed to retail woes. While things have gotten tougher for retailers, customers haven’t gotten more forgiving. According to Zendesk's 2022 Customer Experience Trends, just one bad customer experience can drive consumers to shop elsewhere.…

With recent research showing three out of four consumers prefer communicating with chatbots, it’s no surprise that retail stores want to improve their digital experience. In fact, Gartner predicts 25 percent of enterprises across the globe will have a digital assistant to handle support issues, and it further supports two-thirds of customers who would prefer solving…

Selecting the right customer service outsourcing partner is key to success. Cost and customer experience are likely at the forefront of your mind as you solicit support, but security should be as high of a priority to consider in the decision-making process. Cyber attackers are getting smarter, which means retailers also have to weigh risks…

Managing an efficient customer service team is a challenge, even in relatively quiet times. However, the job gets far more complex when a crisis hits. Managers can foresee some fluctuations in staffing — like during the holidays — but the true test of a retail service center’s strategies comes when an unexpected event forces the…

While the explosive growth of digital shopping in 2020 led to more sales, it also caused a spike in returns as shoppers discovered some of their online purchases didn’t fit, were defective, or failed to meet expectations. For most retailers, an influx of returns expose costly operational weaknesses for processing returns, as well as untapped…

The interactive voice response (IVR) system has been with us for the better part of a century, with its origins dating back to the 1930s. Today’s IVRs do more than let consumers complete a range of routine tasks like checking product availability or store hours. Where brands have embraced conversational artificial intelligence (AI), they’ve found…