The contact center is the most underused growth asset in retail

The panel at CommerceNext Growth Show returned to an old idea, that listening to customers still comes first. What changed, the operators agreed, is that they can now do it at scale, and turn what they hear into action within hours instead of months.

Henry Spear leads digital and customer care across JD North America’s banners. He focused on a channel most retailers overlook, the call center. “The biggest thing that’s changed over the last six months is the ability to take mass quantities of qualitative data, specifically from our call centers, understand all the friction points, make that qualitative data digestible for our agents, and feed it back into our digital experience to improve it,” he said.

Spear calls himself a post-purchase evangelist.

“A bad first purchase or a bad return experience is the easiest and most expensive way to lose a customer,” he said.

His team proactively tells customers when a promised delivery date will not be met and asks if they still want to purchase, and uses propensity modeling built on prior issues to decide whether a shopper should get a chatbot, an AI agent, or a human.

Justin Emig of Artisan Lane Furniture Collective focused on confidence rather than conversion.

“The KPI behind the KPI is confidence.”

“Our job isn’t to convince you to buy a sofa from your couch; it’s to make you feel confident you’re in the right one every day.” He tied that back to why Artisan Lane layers in as much data as it can. “A consumer isn’t buying a T-shirt, they’re buying something they’ll live with for years,” he said, pointing to a purchase cycle that often runs more than ten touch points.

Kristi Carlson of Kendra Scott described stitching unstructured conversation data into structured customer records to serve a relevant experience in the moment. “We can listen to thousands of customer conversations at once,” she said. “If she’s looking at silver earrings on the website, we want our associate to know when she comes in and identifies as a loyalty customer, so they can ask if she’d like to try them on. It’s about being intentional with her intent, without being creepy.” On where this goes next, she said,

“We’re going from prediction to anticipation. The customer expects us to know them well, to be consistent across touch points, and to be proactive rather than reactive.”

Across all operators, the underlying data was already there. What changed, as they each described it, is how fast they can turn what they hear into something a customer notices.