User Experience

Next-Gen Experience Management: Stop Reacting, Start Anticipating
February 23, 2021 at 2:51 pm

In a rapidly changing retail environment, there's one seemingly obvious constant. A positive experience, whether with a brand, product, service or an employee, forms the foundation of meaningful customer engagement and drives sales. The imperative, therefore, is for companies in all industries to figure out how to create experiences that reflect exactly what their customers…

The Key Trends Reshaping CX in a Post-COVID Era
February 14, 2021 at 11:44 am

From small local boutiques to iconic department stores, no corner of the retail sector has been untouched by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the separation between winners and losers has never been so stark. For every mall chain declaring bankruptcy, there’s a competitor that’s quickly responded to the new normal and is reaping the revenue benefits.…

5 CX Lessons Learned in 2020 to Be Applied in 2021
February 11, 2021 at 1:00 pm

The end of 2020 brought an atypical shopping experience for many consumers facing lockdown restrictions. Whether brands were prepared, unprepared or fell somewhere in between in order to meet the rapid shift in consumer behavior due to the pandemic, they all had lessons to learn and room for improvement when it came to meeting and…

Where Are Retailers Focusing Their Resources During the Pandemic?
February 9, 2021 at 7:07 pm

The world of e-commerce is constantly changing, and we wanted to benchmark what areas retailers felt delivered the best customer experience (CX) and return on investment. We worked with Gatepoint Research to survey over 100 of the United States' biggest retailers and digitally native e-commerce brands to understand what was working and what wasn’t in…

5 Commerce Trends That Will Define Customer Experience in 2021
January 26, 2021 at 8:40 pm

2020 was a year like no other. The pandemic upended traditional in-store shopping habits and redirected consumers online like never before. This surge brought unprecedented growth to the e-commerce forecast, with U.S. consumers predicted to increase their spend by 18 percent. While this shows staggering growth in a space with steady momentum already, it also demonstrates…

9 Ways to Boost Customer Experience and Online Engagement
January 25, 2021 at 1:37 pm

The pandemic has accelerated the shift toward digital channels — and heightened the stakes. While in-store retail sales are projected to stay stagnant, e-commerce experienced a 129 percent year-over-year growth in U.S. and Canadian orders as of April 21, 2020. As a result, online customer experiences have become the battleground for businesses seeking to secure…

How to Capitalize on Key 2021 Customer Experience Trends
January 21, 2021 at 5:31 pm

In this episode of Retail Right Now, Total Retail's Joe Keenan and Kristina Stidham discuss an article recently published by Total Retail titled, “5 CX Trends to Help You Win Customers’ Hearts and Wallets in 2021,” authored by Jean Shin, director of strategy and content at tyntec. The article discusses how in 2020, we learned…

How Digital Excellence Became Retail’s Hottest New Look
January 19, 2021 at 3:21 pm

While COVID-19 has brought lots of uncertainty to our world, nothing has been “certain” in the retail world for a very long time, and the current pandemic has undoubtedly disrupted anything resembling “business as usual.” However, whether you run a tiny, web-only startup, are the owner of a single small town brick-and-mortar shop, or the…

Simple Ways Operations Can Help Improve Checkout Conversion
January 12, 2021 at 7:40 pm

Lots of design literature has been written to document e-commerce shopping best practices. User experience (UX) and user interface strategies, like checkout flows or microcopy, matter for increasing purchases. The role operations can play with improving conversion and revenue is often ignored because of its multiple levels of difficulty. Unlike a button, whose color can…