Retail’s Next Frontier: Elevating Customer Experience with Zendesk AI
Zendesk AI：重塑零售客户体验
Retail’s next frontier: Elevating customer experience with Zendesk AI
🚀 The retail industry is entering a new era of customer experience.
🤔 Keep reading to explore how Zendesk AI is transforming retail CX.
As consumer expectations shift and online and offline channels become increasingly connected, retailers are facing new challenges in delivering consistent, high-quality customer experiences.
Many retailers are turning to Zendesk Al to modernize customer service,deliver more personalized interactions, and make it easier for customers to get the help they need.
The benefits go beyond customer satisfaction. Al is also helping retailers differentiate their service operations and respond more effectively in anincreasingly competitive market.
With Zendesk AI, retailers can streamline customer service workflows, better understand customer needs, intelligently route requests, and provide agents with real-time assistance. The result is a more efficient service operation without compromising the customer experience.
AI is also opening up new opportunities for retailers to rethink how they engage with customers and operate at scale.
The global AI services market in retail is projected to grow significantly, from $5 billion to more than $31 billion by 2028. AI is moving beyond an emerging technology and becoming an increasingly important part of the customer experience and operational strategy for retailers.
Among the retailers already exploring this potential are NEXT and Liberty London, which have adopted AI across their customer service operations to improve efficiency and deliver better customer experiences.
NEXT: Using Zendesk AI to Serve 10 Million Customers Worldwide
NEXT is a UK-based multinational retailer offering clothing, footwear, accessories, and home products. With around 700 stores and international franchise operations, the company serves more than 10 million customers across 127 countries and territories.
As customer expectations continue to evolve, NEXT has been investing in technology to modernize its customer experience. In 2022, the company moved to Zendesk, replacing its legacy in-house CRM solution.
Today, NEXT uses Zendesk Enterprise Suite Plus, including Agent Workspace, Help Center, email, chat, social channels, and Zendesk AI. Through Sunshine Conversations, the team can also bring non-voice interactions together and connect them with its chatbot in real time.
Following the implementation, NEXT saw improvements in CX stability and operational efficiency, including a 15% reduction in average handle time (AHT). Less than a year after introducing Zendesk AI, the technology was already demonstrating tangible value across its customer service operations.
NEXT initially introduced AI through its email channel, with 200 agents using the technology. To encourage adoption, the company positioned AI as an agent-assist tool rather than a replacement for human agents, supporting the rollout with training and guidance on best practices and real-world use cases.
“Our success with Zendesk AI has helped build credibility for AI across the business. For many of us, this was the first AI tool that genuinely lived up to expectations and delivered real value.”
——Raz Razaq, Head of Customer Contact Experience Technology, NEXT
NEXT plans to further incorporate Zendesk Intelligent Triage into its broader customer service modernization initiatives. The company has also worked with Zendesk’s compliance team to address data privacy considerations around AI and establish appropriate controls for secure data use and storage.
“Zendesk AI has become a valuable assistant for our teams. We see AI helping us improve the quality of resolution, increase team efficiency, and enhance the overall customer journey.”
——Matthew Hallam, Head of Customer Service Operations, NEXT
Liberty London: Taking Personalized Service Further With Zendesk AI
With more than 150 years of history, UK luxury retailer Liberty London has also been exploring how AI can help take its customer experience to the next level.
As online sales grew to account for nearly 50% of total sales, Liberty recognized the need to modernize its customer service operations.
In 2015, Liberty began using Zendesk for email management, automatically routing customer emails sent to shared inboxes into Zendesk. The company later introduced Zendesk Talk, bringing voice interactions into the same customer service environment. This enabled teams to manage phone and email interactions through a unified platform and maintain customer interaction data in one place.
Today, Liberty uses Zendesk to support customers across phone, chat, email, and messaging channels such as WhatsApp.
Building on this foundation, the CX team uses Zendesk AI to automatically classify and route incoming tickets to the appropriate agents. Intelligent Triage also helps identify customer intent, sentiment, and language, giving agents greater context to understand and respond to customer needs.
The team uses Zendesk analytics to monitor service performance and plans to further leverage Intelligent Triage to help manage ticket backlogs.
“I think AI has enhanced this personalized service because our customers can now interact with a person who has the right information at the right time.”
——Ian Hunt, Customer Service Director, Liberty London
Measuring the Impact: Zendesk AI and Retail CX ROI
For retailers, the value of AI goes beyond improving the customer experience. Its impact also needs to be reflected in measurable operational outcomes.
Liberty London’s results demonstrate this potential. After adopting Zendesk AI, the company reduced first response time by 73% and resolution time by 11%, while increasing customer satisfaction to 90%.
AI-powered self-service also helped Liberty reduce agent-related service costs, allowing specialists to spend more time on complex, higher-value activities such as driving revenue and developing new sales channels. Within just a few months, self-service helped the company save $21,461 in related costs, with further savings continuing to accumulate.
NEXT has also adopted Zendesk AI capabilities including Tone Shift, Expand, and Summarize. As a result, its quality rating increased by 4 percentage points, average email handling time decreased by 11%, and first-contact resolution reached 92%.
Reflecting on how Zendesk has helped Liberty become more agile in addressing customer experience challenges, Razaq said:
“For us, Zendesk isn’t just about reducing costs. It enables us to do things we couldn’t do before.”
From AI Capabilities to a More Connected Service Experience
The experiences of NEXT and Liberty London illustrate how AI is evolving from individual service capabilities into a broader part of the customer service workflow.
From ticket classification and intelligent routing to agent assistance, self-service, and customer insights, AI is helping retailers respond to customer needs more efficiently while reshaping how customers interact with brands.
For retailers, the next step is not simply adopting AI. It is about embedding AI into the customer service workflow and creating a more sustainable balance between customer experience, operational efficiency, and cost.
🎯🔝
Interested in learning more about Zendesk AI? Connect with the Bricom team to explore your options and get expert guidance and support.
Beijing Bridge Communication Co., Ltd (Bricom) is an AWS Partner Network (APN) Partner and a Zendesk Premier Partner. Bricom empowers enterprises in China and around the world to achieve digital transformation and continuous innovation, providing implementation capabilities for Amazon Connect and Zendesk, as well as lifecycle management services for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS).
We offer one-stop integrated solutions for customer interaction data, effectively addressing data silo issues and facilitating the seamless deployment of AI applications for enterprises. By building a unified customer data platform, we realize omnichannel data aggregation and intelligent routing, empowering contact centers to deliver seamless service experiences and fully unlock the value of AI.
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