August 12, 2025
Fixing Broken Links in Retail’s Mobile Customer Service Chain
When a purchase goes wrong, mobile customer service often becomes the lifeline between a shopper and the brand. At its best, it can resolve issues in minutes; at its worst, it leaves customers stuck in a loop of delays and frustration that outlasts the problem itself.
Baker Johnson, Chief Business Officer at UJET, says the problem starts with how businesses think about communication. “There’s a philosophical disconnect. In our personal lives, we text friends and family. In business, we default to email. Customers are in their personal life, but they’re interacting with people in their business life, and the styles clash,” he explains.
Layered on top of that, Johnson says, is the siloed way retail operations are built.
“You have one set of tools for sales, another for marketing, and another for support. Customers have to navigate all of these journeys separately. It leads to transactional interactions instead of relationships,” he notes.
A Smarter Use of Mobile
Johnson believes retailers need to think beyond “mobile customer service” and start thinking in terms of modern relationships, built around how customers actually use their devices. The best technology, he argues, isn’t on the agent’s desktop but in the shopper’s pocket.
He describes the current reality: “If a package arrives damaged, most systems still make you authenticate over the phone, describe the issue, then email photos to a separate address and wait days for a response.”
Meanwhile, a best-case scenario could be: “You take a photo in the app, AI flags it as damaged, attaches it to your record, and a replacement is shipped, sometimes without an agent ever getting involved.”
It’s not necessarily only about the speed. Mobile-first channels capture richer data, such as photos, videos, and metadata, that help retailers build a 360-degree view of the customer. As a result, the data fuels personalisation, more accurate AI responses, and better-informed human agents.
The AI Equation
Retailers often prioritise AI adoption instead of rethinking the entire customer support journey, Johnson warns. “Customer service shouldn’t be a department, and the first priority shouldn’t be the AI. It should be the customer experience with AI supporting it,” he says.
He adds that many AI initiatives fail because they automate broken processes. “Don’t pave the cow paths,” he cautions. “If the journey is fragmented, making it faster won’t fix the problem.”
When implemented well, AI and human agents work together. AI delivers speed and convenience, while humans bring empathy and problem-solving for when things go wrong. Johnson rejects the idea that retailers have to choose between the two: “I want empathy from AI and speed from humans. It’s not either/or—it’s both.”
Rethinking the Upgrade Path
One of the biggest mistakes retailers make, according to Johnson, is piling on disconnected point solutions. “We’ve always bolted on new tools like email, chat, and now AI. Each one adds complexity for the customer and the agent. What we need are unified platforms designed around the customer journey, not departmental KPIs.”
His advice is to start with a clean sheet of paper, map the real customer experience, and “shop yourself” across every channel, from purchase to return. Then design the system around those touchpoints.
In Johnson’s view, mobile should be the backbone of that redesign. “Most retailers are still missing the smart device in their technology stack. It’s the single most powerful tool for delivering fast, simple, human customer service. And it’s already in your customer’s hand,” he concludes.
