Latest news with #customerExperience
Yahoo
18 hours ago
- Business
- Yahoo
H&S expanding use of digital shelf labels
This story was originally published on C-Store Dive. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily C-Store Dive newsletter. H&S Energy Group is adding electronic shelf labels from digital solutions company Aperion to its stores, according to a press release from Aperion's parent company, Hussmann. The retailer tested the labels in seven locations in early 2025, and has now decided to expand the product to all roughly 300 locations. That expansion is expected to complete sometime in 2026. Electronic shelf labels should help H&S make price updates quicker and help create a better customer experience, according to the announcement. H&S's electronic shelf labels will allow the company to instantly update pricing on any item remotely. According to Aperion's brochure, the technology can cut the labor cost of pricing items by up to 90%. The tags can also display additional information, such as whether there's a deal for the item or when something out-of-stock is expected to be back. In its release, Hussmann said H&S plans to eventually use the digital tags for inventory management, digital coupons and loyalty program tie-ins, as well. "This rollout is a key milestone in our broader digital transformation strategy," said Fidaa Mohrez, senior director of operational systems at H&S Energy Group. "By deploying Aperion's Electronic Shelf Labels, we're improving pricing accuracy, reducing manual effort, and delivering a more consistent experience for our customers.' Mohrez also noted that the digital labels cut down on waste, since paper tags won't need to be printed out every time a product or price changes. Since roughly doubling its store count in early 2024 with the acquisition of Andretti Petroleum Group, Orange, California-based H&S has made a number of tech upgrades, including adding car wash subscriptions to its app, adding temperature monitoring to refrigerators, heaters and freezers, and expanding the availability of delivery from its stores. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
National Post
a day ago
- Business
- National Post
Just Energy Partners with HCLTech for AI-Led Business Transformation
Article content NEW YORK & NOIDA, India — HCLTech, a leading global technology company, announced that it has been selected by Just Energy, a leading US-based energy supply company, to enhance Just Energy's operations and customer experience. Article content HCLTech will leverage its integrated Digital Process Outsourcing solutions suite and GenAI platform AI Force to enhance operational efficiency across Just Energy's IT, finance, analytics, customer care, sales and renewals functions. Article content Article content HCLTech will also deploy digitalCOLLEAGUE, its comprehensive and role-specific single-UI platform and Toscona, its business process optimization suite, to improve workforce collaboration and business process management. Article content 'We are confident that HCLTech's proven expertise and commitment to service excellence will help us achieve our key business objectives relating to operational efficiency and service improvements,' said Scott Fordham, Chief Operating Officer of Just Energy. Article content 'We are excited to join Just Energy on their journey to boost operational efficiency and enhance the customer experience. By combining our expertise in GenAI and digital process outsourcing, HCLTech will contribute significantly to Just Energy's innovation strategy and customer satisfaction,' said Ajay Bahl, Chief Growth Officer, Americas, Manufacturing and Allied Industries, HCLTech. Article content is a global technology company, home to more than 223,000 people across 60 countries, delivering industry-leading capabilities centered around digital, engineering, cloud and AI, powered by a broad portfolio of technology services and products. We work with clients across all major verticals, providing industry solutions for Financial Services, Manufacturing, Life Sciences and Healthcare, High Tech, Semiconductor, Telecom and Media, Retail and CPG and Public Services. Consolidated revenues as of 12 months ending March 2025 totaled $13.8 billion. To learn how we can supercharge progress for you, visit Article content Article content Article content Article content Article content Contacts Article content For further details, please contact:
Forbes
2 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Stockouts And Loyalty: Lessons From Whole Foods' Empty Shelves
Some shelves at a Whole Foods in New York City sit emptier on June 10, 2025. (AP Photo/Wyatte ... More Grantham-Philips) Whole Foods has made progress in recent years shedding its elite image as 'Whole Paycheck.' But the specialty grocer is now facing a more down-to-earth problem: empty shelves. And that's not great for customer experience. A cyberattack on June 5 crippled United Natural Foods (UNFI), the $30 billion grocery wholesaler that is Whole Foods Market's largest supplier. UNFI took some of its systems offline – and acknowledged in a filing that day with the Securities and Exchange Commission that the incident had 'temporarily impacted the Company's ability to fulfill and distribute customer orders.' A June 10 photo distributed by The Associated Press (above) showed partially empty shelves at a New York City Whole Foods, five days after the attack. That left some Whole Foods customers unable to find sought-after items such as Sasanian Imperial Osetra Caviar or Nielsen-Massey Madagascar Bourbon Vanilla Extract. Customers expect consistency in every interaction with a brand but perhaps above all in inventory. They want what they want when they want it – and if they don't get it, they will find another retailer who has it. Research shows that millions of consumers are switching brands, a trend driven by cultural shifts that were heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic. The immediate customer experience impact of stockouts extends far beyond a single missed purchase. In the short term, this translates to immediate revenue loss as customers pivot to competitors, often discovering alternatives they might prefer. More damaging is the long-term erosion of trust: repeated out-of-stock experiences can result in order cancellations and returns, increased customer service costs, and brand or reputational risk. According to a study at Walden University, 'repeated stockout experiences decreased customers' loyalty to brand and retailer and caused customers to abandon both.' In short, retailers need to avoid being viewed as unreliable. Even though the shelf shortfalls were not the fault of Whole Foods, the chain can take some steps to at least mitigate the damage. The key is communication, more of it not less. In times of crisis, it's hard to overcommunicate as long as what you are saying has some utility. Customers want information that directly affects them and their families, and all communications should be written from that perspective. Instead, companies often write from their own perspective, talking about all of the things 'we' are doing instead of focusing on how it benefits 'you' the customer. Whole Foods landed somewhere in the middle. One sign spotted in a New York City Whole Foods affixed to semi-empty shelves read: 'We are experiencing a temporary out of stock issue for some products. We apologize for the inconvenience and should have your favorite products back in stock soon.' It explains the problem, at least in general terms – and includes an apology. Even better would have been to: The issue emerged when UNFI 'became aware of unauthorized activity on certain of its Information Technology (IT) systems,' according to the SEC filing. The company responded by activating its incident response plan and implementing 'containment measures,' the filing said. One such measure was proactively taking some systems offline, which caused what UNFI called 'temporary disruptions to the Company's business operations.' Nearly a week later, that meant Whole Foods and some other U.S. grocers who are UNFI customers were only being supplied 'on a limited basis.' UNFI officials told investors on an earnings call that they were working with the FBI to determine the source of the intrusion and why their defenses failed, but little additional information has emerged about the attack. 'We just got penetrated,' CEO Sandy Douglas said. The incident was one of a growing number of cyberattacks affecting retailers and their customers. Victoria's Secret, for example, was forced to take down its U.S. website in late May after what it called a 'security incident' that also left some in-store services unavailable. The retailer later said the incident involved its information technology systems and that the website shutdown was a precaution. Victoria's Secret displayed this message on its home page on May 29, 2025. And in Britain, several recent cyberattacks have taken down retail websites and led to empty shelves in at least one grocery chain. The issues affecting Whole Foods reinforce two truisms about customer experience: the importance of supply chains and the lack of control facing companies. Global supply chains have a major impact on customer experience, as shown once again by Whole Foods paying the price, so to speak, for problems affecting its supplier. Since at least the 1990s, customers have wanted their favorite products faster and faster, and the supply chain disruptions of COVID heightened that trend. Customers tend to not care what's happening in the background – a shipping problem, a delivery problem, containers stuck in ports – they just want the product, fast. And they tend to blame the company if they don't get it. Which illustrates that sometimes there are elements of customer experience that companies just cannot control. Yet even if the issue is not their fault, it's still their problem, as Whole Foods quickly learned. What can companies do? A few things: Even during major crises, customer experience is still the one true competitive advantage. The Whole Foods situation demonstrates that while companies cannot control every element of their supply chain, they can control their response. And that starts with being prepared. Retailers that emerge stronger from stockout situations are those that view these challenges not as isolated operational issues, but as defining moments that reveal their culture of customer-centricity. Inventory issues are inevitable, so the quality of communication, the creativity of solutions, and the speed of recovery become critical components to the long-term customer experience. Customers will forgive single negative experiences, but it's how a company responds that will stick with them and determine their loyalty going forward.
Forbes
2 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
From Chatbots To Workbots: Why NiCE's AI Strategy Focuses On Execution
NiCE is betting that AI agents that complete tasks—not just conversations—will separate winners from pretenders in the enterprise AI race The artificial intelligence hype cycle has reached peak saturation, with technology vendors scrambling to slap "AI-powered" labels on everything from refrigerator recipe suggestions to chatbots that rely on simple keyword matching. Yet, for all the breathless marketing rhetoric, most business leaders are still waiting for AI that simplifies operations and improves data analysis. NiCE, a customer experience platform provider, is making a calculated bet that the next phase of enterprise AI won't be about making chatbots sound more human. The next wave of business outcomes will leverage AI agents that can navigate complex business processes from start to finish with minimal human intervention. NiCE's CEO, Scott Russell said, 'Optimizing knowledge is not just critical for AI to truly thrive in your environment, but it's also the key for transforming service from reactive to proactive, identifying opportunities to solve issues and predict future needs.' NiCE's recent product launches and strategic moves reveal a move toward enhanced automation and agentic AI. The first wave of enterprise AI focused primarily on making data more accessible through conversational interfaces—essentially putting a chat layer on top of existing applications and knowledge repositories. While this represented significant progress in democratizing data access, it only scratched the surface of AI's potential business value. Organizations could ask questions and get answers, but the burden of reasoning through complex decisions and taking action remained entirely on human operators. Going forward, technology vendors, such as NiCE, will use AI to deliver solutions that can reason through multifaceted problems and take semi or fully autonomous action. This evolution from conversational AI to agentic AI represents the difference between AI that informs and AI that performs. Agentic AI enhances a company's ability to analyze context, weigh multiple variables, make informed decisions based on key business performance indicators, and execute actions across interconnected systems. Traditional conversational AI helps a customer service representative find relevant information. Still, agentic AI can help a representative evaluate a customer's complete history more easily, assess risk factors, determine appropriate responses based on business rules, and automatically trigger the necessary workflows to resolve issues end-to-end. "There's a big difference between AI that talks and AI that gets things done," explains Barry Cooper, President of NiCE's CX Division. "While others are building agents that mimic conversations, we're building agents that fulfill customer needs—end to end." This distinction becomes crucial when examining NiCE's CXone Mpower Agents. Traditional AI chatbots had limited access to data, offered scripted responses, and were confined to specific areas of the business, such as front-office or back-office operations. NiCE's AI agent platform aim to break through these constraints by operating across the entire enterprise ecosystem—from initial customer contact through mid-office approvals to back-end fulfillment systems. Admittedly, Agentic AI is the AI buzzword of 2025, but early, well-scoped use cases show promise. Technology companies are increasingly working to streamline AI deployment as traditional approaches require extensive technical resources, custom development, and lengthy implementation cycles. NiCE's model simplifies AI agent creation while maintaining enterprise-grade sophistication through what they call vibe coding, allowing business users to tailor each agent's personality and communication style without requiring technical expertise. While the concept of vibe coding remains ill-defined, and its merits are hotly debated within the enterprise software community, there is a broad consensus around the underlying goal of making AI agents easier to code and deploy. The specific term matters less than the fundamental shift toward empowering business users to create and customize AI functionality without requiring deep technical expertise. In a rapidly evolving tech landscape, no single vendor can deliver everything an enterprise needs to succeed with AI, cloud, data, and digital transformation. Today, companies are no longer looking for isolated solutions—they need interconnected ecosystems. That's why strategic partnerships are essential. By working together, enterprise technology vendors can bridge data and function silos, improving workflows and accelerating innovation. Just as importantly, these alliances help enterprises extract greater value from existing technology investments by ensuring that new capabilities work in concert with the tools already in place. Over the past several months, NiCE has expanded its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and added ServiceNow and Snowflake to the mix. At Interactions 2025, NiCE announced an expanded collaboration with AWS, bringing together NiCE's domain expertise and rich interaction data with AWS's cloud infrastructure and generative AI services, including Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q, and the Amazon Nova family of large language models. The partnership addresses some of the most pressing challenges facing enterprise AI deployments: fragmented workflows, disconnected data, and inconsistent global performance. The partnership focuses on three core pillars. First, content-aware automation ensures that AI-generated responses are highly relevant and context-specific. Using the Amazon Q Index, Mpower Agents are equipped with up-to-date business content—from product documentation to policy details and case histories—enabling them to respond accurately and confidently in real time. Second, the integration delivers enterprise-wide orchestration by bridging front, middle, and back-office operations. NiCE's CXone Mpower Orchestrator automates workflows across functional teams, while Amazon Q Business extends this reach into a broader set of enterprise applications—eliminating silos and streamlining complex processes. Additionally, global scalability is made possible through AWS's robust cloud infrastructure. With low-latency performance and high availability across regions, multinational organizations can deploy and scale AI-driven customer service experiences quickly and consistently around the world. NiCE's partnership strategy also extends beyond AWS to include other critical enterprise platforms, such as ServiceNow and Snowflake. NiCE's latest partnership with ServiceNow aims to eliminate long-standing service gaps by tightly integrating real-time customer engagement with enterprise workflow automation. Announced at ServiceNow's Knowledge 2025 event, the collaboration integrates NiCE's customer service platform with ServiceNow's AI and Customer Service Management (CSM) tools to streamline operations across the entire organization, from the front office to the back. The goal: fully automated customer service fulfillment. The combined solution routes inquiries based on sentiment, intent, and service-level agreements (SLAs)—bridging siloed departments to accelerate resolution times and enhance both customer and employee experiences. Role-based AI copilots assist agents and back-office teams with real-time insights and next-best actions, while continuous optimization tools flag issues and launch workflows automatically. These relationships provide access to complementary technologies and customer bases, allowing NiCE to integrate with the broader enterprise software ecosystem that companies rely on for operations, data management, and workflow automation. NiCE's strategic collaboration with Snowflake aims to unlock the full value of customer interaction data by making it accessible, secure, and actionable across the enterprise. By integrating Snowflake's AI Data Cloud with CXone Mpower, NICE can improve data sharing, breaking down silos that have traditionally limited the impact of customer insights. Snowflake serves as the backbone of the CXone Mpower data lake, centralizing interaction data and enriching it with information from other enterprise systems. This unified data foundation allows organizations to automate key processes—from billing to claims handling—while powering AI-driven analytics, dashboards, and decision-making. The result: faster fulfillment, greater accuracy, and a deeper, organization-wide understanding of the customer experience. Apparently, 2025 is the year of the brand refresh. The technology industry has witnessed updates from Five9, Google's G, Hitachi HPE, and Qualcomm's introduction of Dragonwing, alongside NiCE's own transformation. Every brand refresh has its own story to tell, but NiCE's new logo and marketing campaign represent more than a desire for fresh typography and color schemes. The rebrand indicates the company's strategic desire to expand its AI vision beyond the contact center to encompass its broader portfolio of finance and security solutions. The company describes the rebrand as positioning "NICE to empower brands to deliver AI-powered experiences that are proactive, human-centered and intuitive—whether connecting with customers, protecting communities or combatting financial crime." NiCE's solution involves partnering with actress Kristen Bell, who serves as the face of the company's "NiCE World" brand campaign. The initiative positions Bell as the "NiCEst Person in the World," NiCE said the campaign "builds on NiCE's reimagined brand, championing a future where AI isn't just intelligent – it's connected, intuitive and working behind the scenes to make life better. The enterprise AI market remains in flux, with new entrants and existing players continually repositioning themselves. NiCE's focus on domain expertise, integration depth, strategic partnerships, and automation suggests a company that understands both the technical and implementation requirements necessary for large-scale AI adoption. As enterprises increasingly demand AI that delivers results, NiCE's bet on fulfillment-focused automation may prove prescient. Of course, there's still the matter of cost and return on investment. Most companies struggle to understand and plan for the true product and operational costs of AI. Organizations need to work with their technology vendors to deploy well-scoped use case that deliver measurable return on investment, fast. The question isn't whether AI will transform customer experience—it's which companies will build AI that completes the transformation rather than just talking about it.
Khaleej Times
3 days ago
- Business
- Khaleej Times
Dubai: Free WiFi now available at all bus, marine transport stations
Need to stay connected while waiting for the bus or marine transport? Here's good news: Dubai's Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) announced on Tuesday, June 17, that it has completed the rollout of the free Wi-Fi service in all 43 bus and marine transport stations across the city. The service, in collaboration with e&, enables public transport users to stay connected via their smartphones, tablets, and laptops while commuting, RTA noted, adding 'the initiative is part of (our) ongoing efforts to accelerate digital transformation across all our services.' RTA said the Wi-Fi service will undergo continuous evaluation for expansion and enhancement to ensure 'quality connectivity for passengers using buses and marine transport across the emirate.' Back in March this year, RTA launched its 360 Services Policy 'aimed at enhancing customer experience by providing digital services without requiring in-person visits. As part of its ongoing digital transformation efforts, RTA is shifting its services to self-service models, enabling customers to access them smoothly via shared digital platforms, such as Dubai Now app.
