Retail

Toilet Paper, a Typo, and a Customer Service AI Agent That Wouldn’t Back Down

Who Gives A Crap sells toilet paper by subscription and gives away half its profits to sanitation charities. This has been the Australian company’s remit for some time, but it found itself at the centre of controversy last week. One...

Five Governance Gaps the Superdry Case Exposes in Toxic Retail Leadership

The latest retail scandal is more than another cautionary tale. It exposes how organisational systems fail to hold power to account when the person wielding it sits at the very top. In May 2026, Superdry co-founder James Holder was convicted of raping...

What Is a Customer Loyalty Strategy in 2026? The Case Against Points-Chasing

The average shopper belongs to more than a dozen loyalty programmes. Ask them to name three they actually care about, and most will struggle. That gulf, between enrolment and affection, is the central problem facing every brand still treating customer...

Retail Retention Risk: Nearly Half of Frontline Employees Are Job Hunting While Planning to Stay

New research from employee experience platform Perceptyx points to a more complex retail employee retention risk than the familiar story of disengaged workers heading for the door. Drawing on a panel of 507 retail employees, most of them deskless, the data...

Fake Returns Are Costing Retailers £29 Million

Online returns have become a normal part of shopping and a quiet drain on the retailers who handle them. New research suggests that a meaningful share of what comes back is not what it claims to be, and that most...

Avaya and avatarin Bring Contact Centre AI to the Shop Floor

Avaya and avatarin are extending their collaboration beyond the contact centre, linking AI agents with social robots and on-site hardware to serve customers in physical environments without losing the thread of their digital interaction history. The collaboration connects Avaya Infinity, Avaya’s...

Your Employee Experience Roundup: The Manager Crisis, Falling Worker Confidence, and Persistent Perception Gaps

Are leaders and their employees actually working in the same organisation? That’s the question that springs to mind when looking at the key events and research findings of this week. Decision-makers think engagement is rising; employees disagree by 21 percentage points....

Retail vs. Healthcare vs. Tech: How CX Challenges Differ Across Industries (And What We Can Learn)

The CX profession loves universal principles: journey mapping, closing the loop, and proving ROI. But spend time with leaders actually doing the work, and the industries that share the same language are fighting very different battles underneath. Here’s what three...

Easy Checkout Makes People Spend More (Without Noticing)

The easier it is to pay, the more people spend. That much is obvious. What’s less obvious is how many of them don’t realise they’re doing it. NMI’s Psychology of Payments survey of 1,000 US adults set out to measure how...

SoundHound AI Launches Sales Assist, a Real-Time AI Agent for the Retail Sales Floor

SoundHound AI has announced the launch of Sales Assist, a voice-powered AI agent designed to support in-store retail staff during live customer conversations. The tool delivers instant, data-driven recommendations, including upgrades, bundles, trade-in promotions, and accessories, directly to a tablet...

Salesforce Acquires Cimulate to Advance AI-Powered Product Discovery in Retail Commerce

Salesforce has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Cimulate, an emerging technology company specialising in AI-powered product discovery and agentic commerce. The acquisition advances Salesforce’s push to replace keyword-based search with intent-driven product discovery in retail. Upon completion of the deal,...

Behind Every Sale, There’s a Return Waiting to Happen

If you thought the hard part of the holiday shopping season was getting products into customers’ hands, think again. ACI Worldwide’s new data shows that returns are surging, and the cost of handling them is climbing with it. ACI Worldwide’s latest...