Customer Service

For the past four years, the Gladly team has released its annual Customer Expectations Report to better understand today’s customers — e.g., the types of experiences they want and expect from the brands they love. But as we all know, the world is a very different place today, one where we talk about social distancing…

Retail call centers are an important step in many customer journeys, and for online customers they may be the only human interaction with the brand. Retailers have multiple ways to operate to fulfill the customer need. Should they be in-house or outsourced? Offshore or home-based? How do you expand capacity for business peaks? Whatever route…

Retail sales over the past year have declined 21.6 percent, with recent months piling on additional unprecedented challenges. Not only are consumers embracing e-commerce, but how they seek out support is also changing. Even though these trends started to emerge before the global pandemic, they're now playing out on an accelerated timeline and putting retailers…

In times such as these, when we're asked to stay at home and do our part to #flattenthecurve and help combat the COVID-19 pandemic, retail businesses around the world are experiencing changes in their usual ways of doing business. With more and more cases of coronavirus reported on a daily basis, people are reluctant to…

The whole state of retail is in flux — and it's anybody’s guess what the future holds for consumers, retailers and shopping, especially as the holiday season approaches. All we know is that consumers and retailers alike want to get back to normal. But what will normal be? Will consumers ever feel truly safe shopping…

Creating a great customer experience is no longer a nice to have; it's now a must. Consider that according to Deloitte, customer-centric companies are 60 percent more profitable than companies that don’t focus on their customers. The benefits of being customer-centric and developing great customer experiences are clear, but the road to getting there is…

The digital era hasn’t just transformed a business’ back end; it has revolutionized the customer journey. More and more consumers have embraced digitally native communication channels that weren’t available in the aughts. From text and social messaging, to chatbots and virtual agents, customers now demand that their favorite retailers meet them across their favorite digital…

As with telemedicine for healthcare and online learning for education, digital customer experience (CX) for retail is now a mission-critical path for operational continuity amid the global pandemic. Companies dependent on physical locations that didn't successfully transform their business model for digital are particularly vulnerable to worsening economic forecasts. Among other shortcomings that amassed nearly $1.7 billion…

Recent weeks have brought unprecedented change into all our lives. Most of us are spending more time at home and less time engaging with others in social and work settings. We're restricting trips to stores to just essentials, and that reduces our social exchanges even more. The face-to-face human interactions that made up the fabric…

With COVID-19 causing the majority of retailers to close up shop, and drastic social distancing measures required for those that remain open, many consumers have put a stop to all unnecessary outings and are looking to their favorite brands for remote service and support during this difficult time. In a new Qudini survey of 2,000-plus…