Sunday - April 20, 2008
When it comes to customer service, young consumers often get no respect. Despite the millions of dollars being spent by electronics chains, cell phone companies and other retailers to attract the youth market, I have a pretty strong sense from personal observation that kids often are treated as second-class shoppers. Want proof? Here are two recent experiences involving my own children. In March, my 19-year-old daughter was scheduled to board a plane for a spring break trip. Traveling by herself, she learned that her flight had been delayed, meaning she would miss a connecting flight.
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Friday - April 18, 2008
A new fashion shopping site from Florida boutique La Ti Da is banking on personalized service to set it apart. Visitors to ShopLaTiDa.com, based in Boca Raton, are invited to complete an online profile including profession, style sense, body measurements, preferred designers and areas of shopping where they might need assistance.
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Thursday - March 20, 2008
Retailers in Japan and South Korea have been using image capture technology for several years now, and with the growing base of smartphones, companies in the U.S. are rolling out a wide range of new mobile applications, including some that use interactive digital symbols captured in photos to provide customers with product information, prices and incentives on the spot.
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Wednesday - March 12, 2008
Think of this scene: A woman walks into a high-end department store on Fifth Avenue. As she enters, a salesperson rushes up to her, shouting: "Welcome back, Ms. Smith. Last time you were here, you bought some makeup. I bet you want to buy some perfume today, right?" Web-based commerce has made massive strides in the past 10 years.
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Wednesday - March 5, 2008
My "Creative" for the day, I was told, would be "Sundown." I recently took a test tutorial through Apple's One to One program. The service, which costs $99 a year, allows anyone from a novice to an experienced techie to sit down with an Apple guru one hour a week for one year. These eager teachers, dubbed "Creatives," patiently unpack secrets to everything from the basics of operating an iPhone to movie making.
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Wednesday - March 5, 2008
For anyone doing business online, commerce meets collaboration at a Web 2.0 portal -- a mutual touchpoint for a company, its partners and customers as well as a personalized filter of information and services found on the Web. The goal: aggregating high-value information about people, products and services -- reducing time spent searching Web resources for information.
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Tuesday - February 19, 2008
Online retailers are delivering the goods and better customer service than traditional stores, according to a University of Michigan study expected to be released Tuesday. Customer satisfaction with online retail was even with last year at 83 points on a 100-point scale, but surpassed brick-and-mortar retailers by 12 percent, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index.
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Tuesday - February 19, 2008
RightNow has enhanced its retail industry-specific app with chat and feedback functionality -- changes that give users more outreach options to customers using self-service channels. "With this app, retailers can incorporate feedback into chat," said Susan Meriwether, VP of product marketing, "to make sure [the customer walks] away from an interaction happy with the service dispensed by the rep."
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Thursday - February 7, 2008
Retailers are increasingly focusing on the use of business intelligence as a tool to profile customers and increase loyalty. A survey of Aberdeen's retail community in November 2007 revealed that business intelligence is the top technology that retailers will be focusing on in 2008. Aberdeen surveyed more than 200 retail companies to outline Best-in-Class strategies for improved performance.
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Thursday - January 31, 2008
Most of us have been approached -- gingerly, aggressively, desultorily -- by a sales clerk in a retail store at one time or another as we made our way empty-handed out of the door. What one application -- UpSellit, a virtual chat e-marketing and e-commerce application -- has done is mimicked that last-ditch save-the-sale intervention online.
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Thursday - December 27, 2007
While retailers are rich in data, they are struggling to gather information from point-of-sale systems, planning systems and various other locations where customer, vendor and internal data collection take place. Retailers are generally performing poorly in terms of executing analysis and utilizing their data to derive bottom-line benefit.
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