User Experience

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…

Decreasing Online Shopping Cart Abandonment Through Crowdtesting
December 21, 2020 at 5:27 pm

U.S. Department of Commerce figures show that even with many retail outlets closed for several weeks due to the COVID-19 pandemic, total retail sales rose 4 percent between January and June 2020. Much of this was driven by a 30 percent increase in e-commerce spending. Now, a new Pollfish survey shows nearly 77 percent of…

Retail Recovery and Rebuilding Customer Loyalty Beyond COVID-19
December 21, 2020 at 4:02 pm

The pandemic has changed everything in retail — and it’s not ending anytime soon. Just as stores started to adjust to the “new normal” of frequent disinfection and face masks, the spread of the virus is picking back up in regions across the country, forcing many retailers to close their doors to the public again.…

How the Pandemic is Revamping the Retail Landscape
December 17, 2020 at 12:34 pm

Walking into a brick-and-mortar store today feels a bit apocalyptic. Employees now don gloves, facemasks and even the occasional face shield for added protection. There are stickers meticulously placed at six-foot intervals in front of checkout counters to help consumers abide by social distancing rules. Plexiglass shields now act as a protective barrier between cashiers…