No retailer wants to read complaints about their store on social media platforms such as Yelp or Facebook. And in segments with thin margins, such as grocery stores, a lousy customer experience can be particularly damaging. To improve the customer experience, retailers are increasingly implementing autonomous systems that can continuously monitor stock levels, cleanliness and…

Cisco Systems flagship Contact Center products, Unified Contact Center Enterprise (UCCE) and Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) have not had a major release for a while now. That is about to change in 2019: Due out mid-January, these products will release v.12. As the consolidation happens and the two products move closer together in features…

Just how solid are brick-and-mortar stores? For every brand that closes a store, two others open a new one, according to an August 2018 IHL Group study. And certain segments — such as food and grocery, drugstores, convenience stores, and superstores and warehouses — see almost four openings for every closure. Increasingly, what separates the…

How much do you really know about your customers? The answer goes a long way toward determining how much money your business makes — or loses. That’s why banks and other financial services firms are increasingly using artificial intelligence to get deeper insights into customer needs, wants, habits, risks and more. The lessons learned —…

In recent years, many retailers have rolled out solutions that rely on mobile beacon technology in their stores, only to find that these solutions have failed to yield the results that users craved. The problem hasn’t been with mobile beacons themselves. The technology still holds a lot of potential, which some retailers are using to…

With mass store closures by Sears, Toys “R” Us and other major brands, conventional wisdom says brick-and-mortar retail has one foot in the grave. Wrong. Online sales make up just nine percent of all retail sales, according to a new Deloitte study. The study also found that brick-and-mortar sales are actually growing — to the…