Late last year, Neville Clemens, associate director of customer experience at Wayfair, took to LinkedIn to crowdsource ideas on leveraging the home-goods retailer’s vast troves of unstructured data about the customer life cycle.

“Every other week I hear about AI taking over the world in some newsfeed. Somehow I can’t reconcile that narrative with what seems to be the current state of our ability to deeply understand customer interactions at scale,” he wrote.

“But curious to know if there are truly high-quality solutions that can do this…and by high-quality I mean that the results would be comparable to having an army of humans do the same task manually.”

Fast forward five months, and Clemens, who oversees the customer experience post order (like shipping and delivery) is in the midst of getting proofs of concept from third-party providers who claim to do just that: analyze customer interactions across channels using natural language processing, and identify emerging themes in real time.

Leaking nuance: Clemens is primarily looking for a solution that will enable Wayfair’s customer experience teams to interpret immense amounts of unwieldy call center transcripts.

“One of the primary means of us understanding the customer experience is when [they] call in,” Clemens explained, adding that between chat, email, text, and calls, Wayfair handles “millions” of contacts.

At the end of a conversation, agents choose a tag for the interaction from a dropdown list. But according to Clemens, that’s where a lot of key information slips through the cracks.

Keep reading here.—MA

Retailers and brands are facing some pretty sizable challenges these days. The trick to staying on top and crushing all your channels? Two words: unified platform. Siloed solutions cost time and $$$—one consolidated, integrated platform is *chef’s kiss* perfect.

That’s where Listrak comes in. As a leading customer engagement platform trusted by brands like TOMS and Sol de Janeiro, they can help you drive engagement and reduce spend by orchestrating marketing across all channels: email, SMS, push notifications, and identity resolution.

Listrak’s new Forrester Consulting Total Economic Impact™ study revealed how beneficial their tools can be to a biz. Interviewed clients saw:

• a 45% increase in email-driven revenue
• a 40% increase in SMS-driven revenue
• 20% time savings for the campaign team
• 35% reduced marketing-tool spend

Wanna start acing the marketing game? Read the study.

On Wednesdays, we wear pink spotlight Retail Brew’s readers. Want to be featured in an upcoming edition? Click here to introduce yourself.

Menaka Gopinath is president and COO of Graf Lantz, a Los Angeles-based company making merino-wool felt and cotton products like coasters, placemats, and—more recently—apparel.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in retail? Translating creative, beautiful design ideas to create and deliver products that truly deliver on solving a problem or addressing a tension.

One thing we can’t guess about your job from your LinkedIn profile? The president title is just a title; we are a small business that requires all hands on deck and no ego when it comes to making sure we are delivering on our promise to customers.

What’s your favorite project you’ve worked on? We recently launched our first collection in wearables—cozy essentials [like] hoodies, sweats, slippers, and throws. I love comfy basics, so working with our amazing design team and founders to create items we all loved, was a fun journey. And I’m happy to say, we all love our elevated basics. My hoodie has become a very regular part of my wardrobe rotation!

Which emerging retail trend are you most excited about this year, and why? A focus on longevity and production quality. Consumers are realizing that a higher price point up front for products that are made well and are long-lasting is actually a much better value proposition,  plus it’s better for our environment.

Keep reading here.—EC

You know this: Retailers are continually striving to improve their relationships with consumers, and one of the ways they do that is by creating what they believe are the best possible experiences for them. Throughout the month of May, we’re digging into how companies are meeting the challenges inherent in the ongoing effort to improve the customer experience.

But first, coffee we’re taking a quick look back at April, ICYMI, when our monthly theme was resale:

Resale’s unsold: As Andrew Adam Newman reports, some of the trendiest brands out there have yet to jump on one of retail’s biggest trends. So, why are they choosing to remain on the resale sidelines, and will they ever get in the game?

• Retail brands are launching resale programs in droves, but some major players are holding back

Seismic thrift: You might think the abundance of retailers integrating resale into their operations these days would be bad for business for thrift stores like Thrift NYC, not to mention Goodwill. Think again, as Katishi Maake details.

• Thrift shops and Goodwill thrive even amid the resale explosion

She sells, resells: With everyone from Carhartt and H&M to Gucci and Balenciaga getting into the resale market, Jeena Sharma poses this seemingly straightforward question: Is a resale platform still a good bet for fast fashion and luxury retailers?

• Should fashion retailers still be launching resale platforms?

Resale reinvented: Maeve Allsup spoke with experts about the emerging technologies with the biggest potential to transform resale work.

• The resale world is paying close attention to emerging technologies

Today’s top retail reads.

A long walk: Amazon’s plans to implement and scale its Just Walk Out technology have faltered as it struggles to control costs and form retail partnerships. (The Information)

Public image: With IPO plans on the horizon, Reformation aims to prove that “you can be a profitable business; you can make investors money; and you can actually have a conscience while doing it,” according to CEO Hali Borenstein. (Bloomberg)

Big swings: Wilson Sporting Goods’s latest retail store opening in California is continuing the brand’s push to grow beyond its wholesale partners. (Modern Retail)

Catch up on the Retail Brew stories you may have missed.

• What hemp industry leaders hope to see in the 2023 Farm Bill
• The retail startups to watch
• Bed Bath & Beyond’s future likely won’t be in stores