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Retailers that want to build strong, lasting customer relationships must engage each customer in a personalized, helpful, and timely way — every time. When customers feel known and valued, they’re more likely to stay loyal, share their experiences, and spend more.
To do this at scale, retailers need intelligent systems that deliver great service. It’s not just about problem solving; it’s about showing up with the right context, anticipating needs, and adding value in every interaction.
75% of CX and contact center leaders say customers now expect more knowledge and guidance from their service advisors.
Why your contact center can be your best source of customer insight
If your contact center is where most of your customer interactions happen, then it should also be where you’re learning the most about your customers.
But many contact centers aren’t set up for this. They’re treated as cost centers, not strategic functions. They’re reactive, not predictive. And they often lack the customer data and intelligence needed to act differently.
With the right systems in place, that reputation can change. The modern contact center is becoming a rich source of customer insight that can inform everything from how you engage to what you offer next.
Some valuable data retailers can surface include:
- Customer identifiers like phone numbers tied to accounts
- Recent activity, including purchases, complaints, and service interactions
- All first-party information about their preferences and account idiosyncrasies, like whether or not their number is capable of receiving texts and how they like to receive those texts (SMS, WhatsApp, etc.), who else is on the account with them (spouse, children), etc.
When retailers have access to this kind of insight, they start to see a much clearer picture of customer preferences and can answer questions like:
- What are their buying habits and interests?
- What do they like or dislike about your brand?
- Which policies have the biggest impact on their experience?
- Which products are most often returned?
- Where in your supply chain are customer issues happening most?
Surfacing insights from this data turns contact centers from a problem processor into a proactive driver of customer loyalty and business growth.
Maximizing structured conversational insights from the contact center
Recent breakthroughs in agentic AI are enabling AI agents to carry out conversations that are indistinguishable from talking to a person. AI agents can understand what a caller wants, answer common questions, direct calls to the right person, and even complete transactions—all while making sure the customer experience is smooth.
What makes AI agents pivotal in generating a clear customer profile is that they automatically turn unstructured conversational data into usable, structured data.
Retailers can extract trends and patterns from this structured conversational data to deliver hyper-personalized experiences, shape customer support strategy, and directly influence strategy across marketing, sales, and digital teams.
Boosting marketing impact through contact center collaboration
Marketing teams spend a lot of time and resources on customer research, but these insights are already available within a retail organization. With customer insights generated from customer service interactions, marketing teams benefit in the following ways.
Get ahead of trends
Every customer interaction—whether it’s about product availability, delivery issues, or promotions—offers real-time feedback on what customers want and need. Sharing these insights with marketing teams regularly helps the team stay nimble, adjusting strategies quickly to ensure campaigns stay relevant and resonate with new and existing customers.
Support ongoing campaigns
Supporting marketing campaigns through the contact center can be challenging and often requires a lot of training for agents. However, with AI agents handling calls, you can run campaigns more efficiently without needing to train every agent.
Build a 360-degree view of your customers
When retailers integrate contact center data with existing marketing analytics, they gain a more complete picture of customer behaviors and preferences. This enables marketing teams to access valuable insights without overwhelming customers with constant data requests. It also helps refine customer support processes, aligning them more closely with customer expectations.
We surveyed CX and contact center leaders at enterprise companies with annual revenue of $500m+ to get the scoop on how AI is changing the customer service landscape.
Find out what they had to say.
Turning contact center data into personalized sales experiences
Support teams get direct access to honest, real-time customer feedback, including preferences, concerns, and reactions to products or services. When these insights are shared with sales, they can be used for upsell opportunities and create processes to deliver more value to customers and retail organizations.
Whether agents hand calls over to sales agents at critical opportunity points or use AI agents to trigger upsell protocols based on customer behavior, retailers can drive revenue without distracting agents from the task at hand.
Build hyper-targeted sales campaigns
Sales can also develop highly targeted campaigns by using specific channel insights. Whether it’s tailoring promotions for online channels, social media, or traditional advertising, understanding where your customers are most active and receptive allows your sales team to maximize the impact of their outreach efforts. This also ensures that customers receive offers that are relevant to their preferences, increasing the likelihood of engagement and conversion.
Your step-by-step guide to effective and efficient voice AI implementation.
Improving the digital experience
With brick-and-mortar stores continuing to close in 2025 and consumer shopping habits shifting, retailers need to strengthen their digital channels to meet customers online and stay competitive.
When customers run into problems on digital channels, they turn to customer service for help. Customer support teams can provide insights about technical issues and customer preferences, create value for the wider organization, and free staff from routine problems.
Spot technical issues early
If something’s broken—a website bug, a checkout failure, app downtime—your customers will be the first to tell you. Customer service teams are well-positioned to surface these issues early and pass them along to digital teams before they escalate into bigger problems. This doesn’t just save your brand’s reputation, it also helps reduce avoidable call volume and lets your digital teams fix issues faster.
Find and fix friction in the customer journey
Customer conversations often reveal small pain points that don’t always appear in analytics alone. Capturing detailed conversational data helps you pinpoint exactly where customers are getting stuck. Sharing these insights with your digital teams lets them address friction in the experience, improve accessibility, and design smoother, more intuitive journeys that keep customers moving—and loyal.
Bridge the gap between channels
Even in 2025, many customers still prefer to pick up the phone instead of navigating an app or website. AI agents can send customers a direct link to the right page via SMS. With the right strategy, you can show customers you’re there for them while encouraging greater adoption of digital channels, reducing average handle times, and improving overall satisfaction.
The strategic value of contact center insights
With the right voice AI infrastructure, retailers can transform their contact centers from reactive problem-solvers into proactive engines for customer satisfaction. From enhancing marketing strategies to improving the digital experience, the insights gathered from every customer interaction can drive value across the entire retail organization.
By unlocking the full potential of your contact center data with voice AI, you can create personalized, meaningful customer experiences that drive loyalty and growth.
The goal is to know exactly what to say next, how to say it, and what to solve first. This is what turns routine interactions into moments of connection and makes customer support a revenue driver, not just a cost to manage.
Speak to our team today to find out how PolyAI can help scale your retail customer service and build customer loyalty by offering best-in-class customer service.
