Customer Service

The ability to better understand customer buying behavior, and then being able to actually use that knowledge to create optimized (i.e., personalized) marketing campaigns, is a key differentiator for retailers in today's hypercompetitive market, particularly when it comes to reaching and communicating with consumers online. 
With this in mind, Macy's has invested in a predictive analytics solution from SAP. The national department store chain, and specifically its e-commerce operation, Macys.com, deployed SAP's InfiniteInsight solution in the first quarter of 2014.

In line with its usual philosophy of extreme customer service, Zappos has introduced a new service that can help consumers track down any fashion item — even if the company doesn't sell it. Called Ask Zappos, the service provides a digital personal assistant who takes requests in the form of images and finds the exact item, while also providing links to some alternatives. Zappos has been testing the service since the beginning of June, but started promoting Ask Zappos on its mobile homepage last week.

Kohl's department store is opening a customer service operations center this week in Dallas and plans to employ 1,500 people in four years. The center has a health care clinic, an idea that more companies are adopting to increase productivity. It also has an on-site cafe. The Wisconsin-based retailer said it's hiring full- and part-time workers at the 240,000-square-foot facility.

Deliv CEO Daphne Carmeli calls the startup she founded two-and-a-half years ago a disrupter for the retail world, and as CEO she's entitled to boast. But Carmeli isn't that far off in her description of a service that, with a few tweaks and twists, can be likened to a far more famous disrupter — rideshare services Uber and Lyft. Deliv is a crowdsourced delivery service used by retailers like Williams-Sonoma and a growing number of malls owned by such companies as General Growth Properties and Simon Property Group. 

Join us for this fast-paced session covering advanced strategies retailers can use to optimize your email marketing performance.

Listen as we map out simple customer service best practices you can implement today, and keep customers coming back time and again.

How small retailers (both online and brick-and-mortar) can compete with Amazon and its vast resources, cheap pricing and fast delivery.

How do you compete if you can’t offer same-day delivery? Doug Sternberg offers his expert thoughts in this webinar.

Last year, 61 percent of retailers cited customer retention as their greatest obstacle. It's easy to view e-commerce innovations as the enemy when a once-faithful customer base abandons brand loyalty in favor of the cheaper or faster option. But these challenges offer retailers opportunities to take a hard look at existing loyalty programs and business strategies to make updates that better suit the changing behaviors of their target markets. Here are five methods retailers can use to grow customer loyalty in today's digital age:

Kohl's CEO Kevin Mansell has stated that he intends to turn the company into the most engaging retailer in the nation. Even though the nationwide department store chain remains very profitable, Kohl's will face an uphill climb before it can claim the title of "most engaging retailer in the nation." Despite a seemingly impressive 2013 sales number, the retailer's sales were actually down 1.3 percent from the year earlier. Kohl's and other big-box retailers are having to come to terms with rapidly changing technology as well as the resulting changes in the shopping habits of American consumers.