Customer Service

There are multiple departments within a retail organization, so which are most important? If we’re equating worth to cost — i.e., the annual salaries of employees within each department — then supply chain executives are most critical (see chart below). This was just one of the findings of Total Retail's recently released 2018 Salary Benchmark Report,…

Retailers face a number of challenges, including competition from nimble e-commerce upstarts and increasingly impatient customers. The industry is recognizing that as the needs of the modern consumer change, the customer experience they offer needs to evolve with it. A large part of that evolution has been the shift to omnichannel support. Omnichannel solutions allow retailers…

This report from customer engagement and analytics software provider Calabrio includes responses from more than 3,000 consumers in the U.S. and U.K. about the customer experience journey, and what motivates them. The findings are clear: human nature is how customers think, feel and act — and it drives their digital behavior. To gain their loyalty, customers should feel heard and have an emotional attachment to the brand, and that can only be created through the human connection.

In episode 154 of Total Retail Talks, Joe Alexander, founder and CEO of Nest Bedding, discusses how the mattress and bedding company is humanizing the in-store shopping experience, and why the strategy is paying dividends. In addition, Alexander offers advice for other retailers that are looking to create a differentiated in-store shopping experience for their…

In this interactive webinar, our experts with discuss key omnichannel best practices and tips for delivering compelling campaigns!

Competition in retail has always been intense. Surviving, let alone thriving, requires heavy technology spending. In the modern retail era, customers have all the power. Phones and digital devices serve as entry points into shopping experiences. At the click of a button, consumers have access to unlimited product assortments, price transparency, inventory availability, and crowdsourced…

Most businesses will tell you they deliver good customer service, but what do their customers think? Mitel’s Global Customer Experience Survey builds on results from a 2017 global survey of IT decision makers. When Mitel saw that 59 percent of businesses reported being more than halfway through their customer experience improvements, it wondered if its customers agreed. That question and many others were posed to a group of more than 5,000 adults in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany and Australia as part of the customer experience survey. The results present an eye-opening midterm assessment that reveals many businesses still have a long way to go toward improving the buyer’s journey.

As companies increasingly look to provide a better experience for customers, offering support across multiple channels is becoming more popular than ever. According to the Aberdeen Group, companies doubled the number of channels they use to interact with customers between 2012 and 2017. But there’s a difference between providing support on a few channels and delivering a truly integrated omnichannel solution. Using the Zendesk Benchmark, our crowd-sourced index of customer service interactions from 45,000 participating organizations across 140 countries, we examined why companies are going omnichannel and what sets the companies using Zendesk for omnichannel support apart from everyone else.

Even if companies understand that an omnichannel approach performs better in terms of operational metrics and meeting customer expectations, there’s still the question of how to do it. How should companies go about adopting an omnichannel support solution? With data from the Zendesk Benchmark, our index of product usage data from 45,000 Zendesk customers, we put together findings on best practices when it comes to launching new channels, integrating existing channels, and teaming up with the right technology partners.

At a time when it’s routine for millions of consumers to ask digital assistants (e.g., Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri) to tell them a good joke or ask if they need an umbrella, it’s surprising most businesses are still in the early stages of implementing intelligent automation technologies for customer communication. Even fewer have made…