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The state of customer care in 2022

Customer care leaders are facing a perfect storm of challenges: call volumes are up, employees are leaving and harder to replace, and digital solutions aren’t yet delivering on their full promise. Add rising customer expectations and decades-high inflation  to the mix, and it’s easy to understand why customer care leaders are feeling the pressure.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Jeff Berg , Eric Buesing , Paul Hurst, Vivian Lai, and Subhrajyoti Mukhopadhyay, representing views of McKinsey’s Customer Care service line.

The stakes couldn’t be higher as teams try to adapt to a postpandemic era of customer care. Over the past two years, leaders have had to quickly adapt systems and ways of working to accommodate the shift to working from home—up to 85 percent of their workforces, in some cases. Contact center employees are harder to hold onto, and nearly half of customer care managers experienced increased attrition in 2021, leading to performance variability.

Over the past two years, customer care leaders have had to quickly adapt systems and ways of working to accommodate the shift to working from home.

While digital solutions and the shift to self-service channels will solve many of these challenges, they aren’t quite reaching the goal. For most organizations, the vast majority of digital customer contacts require assistance, and only 10 percent of newly built digital platforms are fully scaled or adopted by customers.

Not surprisingly, McKinsey’s 2022 State of Customer Care Survey has found that customer care is now a strategic focus for companies. Respondents say their top three priorities over the next 12 to 24 months will be retaining and developing the best people, driving a simplified customer experience (CX)  while reducing call volumes and costs, and building their digital care and advanced analytics ecosystems.

With challenges on all fronts, the question now confronting leaders is how best to prioritize investment across the people, operations, and technology aspects of their customer care strategies. Knowing where to focus or what to do first isn’t easy, and businesses need to move quickly. Companies that don’t invest in this area face the possibility of further talent attrition, customer dissatisfaction, and even loss of market share.

But customer care is also now a major opportunity for businesses. Done well—through a combination of tech and human touch—it is an area where companies can drive loyalty through a more personalized customer journey while unlocking greater productivity, increased revenue, improved job satisfaction, and real-time customer insights.

This article presents the key findings of the 2022 State of Customer Care Survey and how businesses are shifting priorities at this critical time.

Challenges on all fronts

To uncover the latest trends in customer care, McKinsey surveyed more than 160 industry leaders and experts at the director, senior director, vice president, and C-suite levels to find out how their operations have been affected over the past two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Care is at an inflection point

The survey findings indicate that customer care is at an inflection point. Call volumes are higher and more complex than before, while companies find themselves struggling to find talent and train them to proficiency at pace.

As customer care increasingly moves online, the distinction between digital and live interactions has also begun to blur. Organizations are looking for new capabilities that will enhance both the customer and employee experience in “moments that matter”—those interactions that may have previously happened face to face or have significant influence on overall CX.

Compared with results of the 2019 State of Customer Care Survey, customer care leaders are now more focused on improving CX, reducing contact volumes, deploying AI assistance, and increasing revenue generation on service calls (Exhibit 1).

Customer care talent is increasingly scarce

Higher call volumes and more complex calls are challenging existing capacity—61 percent of surveyed care leaders report a growth in total calls, with increased contacts per customer and a growing customer base as the key drivers. And 58 percent of care leaders expect call volumes to increase even further over the next 18 months.

While a growing customer base is a positive sign for business, it puts greater pressure on contact centers that are already under strain. More customers mean increased call numbers, and with more complex calls, customers tend to have to phone contact centers over and over again—further affecting capacity and resulting in a more negative CX overall.

To make matters worse, talent attrition is affecting customer care capacity. Employees are leaving faster than they did before the pandemic—a result of the Great Attrition—and are more difficult to replace. Nearly half of surveyed managers report increased employee attrition over the past 12 months.

The top-cited reason for employees leaving is poaching by competitors—58 percent—alongside employee burnout, employee dissatisfaction, lack of advancement opportunities, and poor work–life balance (Exhibit 2).

Retaining talent could prove vital in the race to maintain capacity. New hires require significant staff training, with 41 percent of surveyed leaders reporting that it takes between three and six months to train a new employee for optimal performance and a further 20 percent saying it takes more than six months.

Uniting self-service and live channels

Many companies have made significant investments in digital care capacity in recent years, though cross-channel integration and migration issues continue to hamper progress. For example, 77 percent of survey respondents report that their organizations have built digital platforms, but only 10 percent report that those platforms are fully scaled and adopted by customers. Only 12 percent of digital platforms are highly integrated, and, for most organizations, only 20 percent of digital contacts are unassisted.

In an increasingly digital first environment, however, customer care is fundamental to how organizations interact with their customers. Leaders in this field are asking, “How do we create a better, more personalized experience through digitally enabled services?”

Businesses are investing in three critical areas

Faced with the challenges of a fast-changing and demanding environment, companies can’t afford to refrain from acting on the customer care storm. Over the past two years, customers have flocked to digital channels because of the pandemic, and organizations have had to race to meet their needs with new channels that support remote and digital transactions.

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In a postpandemic future, this pivot to digital is likely to keep growing. And while many companies believe that they have made significant strides in their customer care transformation journey, a significant number remain at a foundational level—they are improving self-service options and automating common requests but haven’t yet moved far enough along the journey to distinguish from their competitors. Meanwhile, those that have the leading edge are leveraging real-time customer behavior insights and conversational AI to deliver proactive customer outreach.

Customer care leaders say their top three priorities over the next 12 to 24 months are to retain and develop the best people, drive a simplified CX while reducing call volumes and costs, and build out their digital care ecosystems.

Retain and develop the best people

Traditionally, customer care talent has been regarded as cheap, easy to replace, and relatively low skilled. But with call volumes growing and calls becoming more complex to resolve, these employees now require more strategic consideration.

With three out of five surveyed leaders citing attracting, training, and retaining talent as a top priority, businesses are looking at ways to build a better organizational culture. Two of the most effective ways to do this—according to customer care leaders—are to find ways to motivate and build trust with employees and to encourage leaders to listen and act on employee feedback (Exhibit 3).

Shift the interactions

Shifting the workload away from transactional, repetitive calls can address a number of the headaches facing customer care leaders. The move can free up capacity to improve CX while offering more rewarding work to employees.

Companies are looking to shift from a transactional to a solution-oriented interaction during the live, complex calls that matter most to customers. Organizations are also turning to self-service channels and tech to resolve high volumes. And the strategy is working. Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed that decreased their call volumes identified improved self-service as a key driver (Exhibit 4).

Organizations are planning to increase digital interactions one and a half times by 2024. The top three areas identified for investment include tech that improves omnichannel and digital capabilities—for example, chatbots and AI tools—automated manual activities in contact centers, and advanced analytics capabilities.

Despite digital tech taking on more of the burden for customer service interactions, human assistance will likely remain an important driver of overall CX, especially in the moments that matter. Customers want fast, efficient service, but they also want personalized customer care, whatever the channel of engagement.

Develop AI-powered customer care ecosystems

The growing challenges around increasing volumes, rising complexity, and limited talent availability are unlikely to be solved at scale without AI and data analytics. Companies can optimize the entire customer operations footprint by using tech to measure performance, identify opportunities, and deploy value-capturing change management, thus delivering critical operations insights and impact at scale.

For customers, AI-driven tools like predictive analytics can deliver a personalized and proactive experience that resolves issues before customers are even aware that they exist—enhancing CX at every point along the customer journey. Tech can also assist in developing a high-performing workforce by identifying optimal work processes and practices using analytics. Automated coaching can potentially be deployed to every individual, supporting efforts to attract, develop, and retain scarce talent.

How CEOs can win the new service game

In the AI-powered care ecosystem, around 65 percent of tasks and 50 to 70 percent of contacts are automated, creating a true omnichannel experience that provides a consistent and seamless experience across interactions. In this way, the potential of contact centers could be unlocked to become loyalty-building revenue generators through greater solutioning and sales excellence.

Putting priorities into practice

CX is fast becoming a key competitive area. Companies that don’t prioritize their strategy and digital transformation journeys are likely to face continued customer dissatisfaction, as well as talent attrition—thus threatening their brand and market competitiveness.

Getting customer care right depends on prioritizing and investing across the people, operations, and tech aspects of the customer care strategy. Companies can consider the following key steps as they look to build out their capabilities and invest in their digital care ecosystems:

• Start by setting out the vision for the customer care organization, capturing what excellence looks like.
• Conduct a rapid but thorough due-diligence-style assessment of people, processes, and capabilities, looking at the customer care operation in a new light to identify not just incremental changes but a reimagined, large-scale transformation.
• Path one follows a traditional design approach, which may take longer but prove less risky, as the entire transformation is considered at the outset.
• Path two involves an interactive and agile design, test, and iterate methodology, which may lead to new solutions quickly.
• Leverage the full suite of available technologies and analytical approaches that are driving successful outcomes in customer care, including natural language processing (NLP) and AI in frontline operations to match work to workers, together with cognitive AI assistance for resolving simpler customer queries.

Personalized digital interaction nowadays is an expectation rather than a luxury or an added perk, and customer care is the issue at the heart of this digital first environment—companies can’t afford to stumble at this juncture. If done well, however, customer care presents a great opportunity to build loyalty and long-term relationships with customers, creating organizational resilience for the future.

Jeff Berg is a partner in McKinsey’s Southern California office; Eric Buesing is a partner in the Stamford, Connecticut, office; Paul Hurst is a consultant in the Charlotte, North Carolina, office, Vivian Lai is a consultant in the New York office, and Subhrajyoti Mukhopadhyay is an expert in the Chicago office.

The authors wish to thank Karunesh Ahuja and Charles-Michael Berg for their contributions to this article.

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New Research Identifies Service Frameworks to Improve Customer Service without Breaking the Bank

By Nathaniel Luce

In the world of customer service, “first-contact resolution” (when a customer’s issue is fully resolved on the first try) is paramount. Studies show that higher rates of first-contact resolution lead to reductions in operations costs, higher customer satisfaction, and higher customer retention rates, among other benefits. Companies strive to increase first-contact resolutions by lowering rates of “retrial” (when a customer’s issue requires multiple resolution attempts).

For many companies, lowering retrial rates can be a struggle, and the problem often boils down to resources. Existing research suggests that 2 factors – pickup speed (how quickly representatives address the request) and service quality – can reduce the volume of retrials, but improving speed and quality may require budget-busting levels of investment in personnel and training.

Study Background

A new study by Kejia Hu , Assistant Professor of Operations Management at Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management, analyzed customers’ online and offline preferences from a bank’s customer contact center’s records to build a set of frameworks that companies can use to reduce retrial rates across service channels without unpalatable levels of investment.  “The research illustrates how a data-driven approach enables firms to make informed decisions and unlock valuable insights,” Hu says.

“Understanding Customer Retrials in Call Centers: Preferences for Service Quality and Service Speed”, which appears in the upcoming edition of Manufacturing & Service Operations Management , was co-authored by Gad Allon from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Achal Bassamboo from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

Solving the Problem with Customer Service

The study finds that customers do indeed value high service quality and quick pickup speed, but that sensitivity to the 2 factors depends on the type of customer. Results show that private customers are more sensitive to quality and less sensitive to speed than business customers.

With differences like these in mind, Hu and her co-authors developed 2 design systems that account for the preferences of private and business customers.

The first involves no expansion of service team size, only different allocations along customer groups. The second involves adjusting the ratio of high-quality to ordinary-quality support center agents based on the number of customers of each type. Both models resulted in significant gains in “customer surplus” (a measure of value that accounts for the rewards of customer services and the cost of waiting) for both customer types.

These design systems aren’t relegated exclusively to traditional call centers, where support services are provided exclusively over the telephone. They can be applied to identify preferences across different types of service channels.

“For example,” Hu says, “the solution team on social media like Twitter and Facebook, the SMS interaction channel, and the rising trend of live chat channel on the website are alternative contact channels that may trigger retrials. Using our framework of analysis, firms can tailor the best channel to serve distinct preferences in customer segments.”

What does this mean for customer relationship management?

The authors note in the paper that their research “has already received strong interest from a globally renowned hotel chain to improve its customer relationship management across call centers, live chat, social media, and other digital and virtual service channels.”

Regardless of industry, the study highlights the need for managers to prioritize customer preferences in order to improve customer services within budget. “It is crucial for service providers to understand customer behavior across channels,” the paper states, “so that they can effectively plan their investment for multichannel customer relationship management.”

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International Journal of Physical Distribution & Materials Management

ISSN : 0269-8218

Article publication date: 1 February 1989

Although significant advances have been made in customer service research, a majority of this research has concentrated on defining and measuring the importance of customer service in isolation from the other components of the marketing mix. In order to achieve a competitive advantage from customer service, it is necessary to establish service levels as part of the firm′s overall marketing strategy. This monograph reviews the development of customer service; evaluates past customer service research; presents a methodology for integrating customer service and marketing strategy, and provides some suggestions for future research.

• Marketing mix
• Customer service
• Marketing strategy

Sterling, J.U. and Lambert, D.M. (1989), "Customer Service Research: Past, Present and Future", International Journal of Physical Distribution & Materials Management , Vol. 19 No. 2, pp. 2-23. https://doi.org/10.1108/EUM0000000000306

Copyright © 1989, MCB UP Limited

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70 Customer Service Statistics to Know in 2024

Updated: January 31, 2024

Published: June 27, 2022

Today, customer service has become a crucial factor in choosing one brand over another. In fact, various customer service statistics show that customers want to invest in brands that focus on their needs and constantly provide value beyond the initial purchase.

This post will highlight some key customer service statistics that will help you understand the landscape better and brainstorm new strategies for strengthening your service team . And if you're in a pinch, jump right to the stats you need.

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HubSpot surveyed 1,400 customer service leaders to find out what challenges they’re facing, their goals, and how they use technology to deliver excellent customer service. Download our free report to learn how service teams across the globe deliver on core metrics.

70 Customer Service Stats to Know

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43. 55% of customer support specialists agree that by 2024, most software they use will have AI or automation capabilities built-in. (The State of AI Survey by Hubspot)

44. 66% of customer service pros who use AI/automation agree that by 2024, AI/automation tools will be able to do most customer service related tasks independently. (The State of AI Survey by Hubspot)

45. 84% of customer service pros who use AI/automation agree that by 2024, AI/automation tools can make it easier for them to respond to customer service requests. (The State of AI Survey by Hubspot)

46. 42% of customer service pros who use AI/automation state that AI tools that collect and analyze customer feedback will significantly improve the customer experience. (The State of AI Survey by Hubspot)

47. 22% of customer service pros who use AI/automation state that AI tools help them optimize the customer service process. (The State of AI Survey by Hubspot)

48. Reps who use chatbots to respond to customer service requests save up to 2 hours and 20 minutes a day. (The State of AI Survey by Hubspot)

49. 44% of customer service pros state that they don't use AI because consumers prefer to interact with a human over AI. (The State of AI Survey by Hubspot)

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Customer Research

What is customer research.

Customer research is conducted so as to identify customer segments, needs, and behaviors. It can be carried out as part of market research, user research, or design research. Even so, it always focuses on researching current or potential customers of a specific brand or product in order to identify unmet customer needs and/or opportunities for business growth.

Customer research can focus on simple demographics of an existing or potential customer group (such as age, gender, and income level). Indeed, these considerations are vital determinants of a product’s target audience. However, such research also often seeks to understand various behaviors and motivators —factors which place a product’s use and potential on a higher level of study. Thus, the goal of such research is to expose clear details about who is—or will be—using a product as well as the reasons behind their doing so and how they go about using it (including the contextual areas of “where” and “when”). Customer research may be conducted via a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, and ethnographic field studies. It also commonly involves doing desk research of online reviews, forums, and social media to explore what customers are saying about a product.

While customer research is usually conducted as part of a design project, it is also often conducted in other departments of an organization. In some cases, customer research is part of marketing—for instance, to ensure that marketing campaigns have the right focus. In other cases, it can be carried out as part of concept development or ideation so as to identify opportunities for future products, services, or features. In any case, such research is an essential ingredient in keeping the end users in clear sight long before the end of any design phase.

Literature on Customer Research

Here’s the entire UX literature on Customer Research by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Customer Research

Take a deep dive into Customer Research with our course User Research – Methods and Best Practices .

How do you plan to design a product or service that your users will love , if you don't know what they want in the first place? As a user experience designer, you shouldn't leave it to chance to design something outstanding; you should make the effort to understand your users and build on that knowledge from the outset. User research is the way to do this, and it can therefore be thought of as the largest part of user experience design .

In fact, user research is often the first step of a UX design process—after all, you cannot begin to design a product or service without first understanding what your users want! As you gain the skills required, and learn about the best practices in user research, you’ll get first-hand knowledge of your users and be able to design the optimal product—one that’s truly relevant for your users and, subsequently, outperforms your competitors’ .

This course will give you insights into the most essential qualitative research methods around and will teach you how to put them into practice in your design work. You’ll also have the opportunity to embark on three practical projects where you can apply what you’ve learned to carry out user research in the real world . You’ll learn details about how to plan user research projects and fit them into your own work processes in a way that maximizes the impact your research can have on your designs. On top of that, you’ll gain practice with different methods that will help you analyze the results of your research and communicate your findings to your clients and stakeholders—workshops, user journeys and personas, just to name a few!

By the end of the course, you’ll have not only a Course Certificate but also three case studies to add to your portfolio. And remember, a portfolio with engaging case studies is invaluable if you are looking to break into a career in UX design or user research!

We believe you should learn from the best, so we’ve gathered a team of experts to help teach this course alongside our own course instructors. That means you’ll meet a new instructor in each of the lessons on research methods who is an expert in their field—we hope you enjoy what they have in store for you!

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Impersonal service: OSU research identifies when consumers prefer bots over real people

C OLUMBUS, Ohio – When it comes to customer service, a new study suggests that there are times we’d prefer to talk to bot rather than an actual human being.

According to the new study by researchers at Ohio State University, consumers don’t always want to talk to a real person when they’re shopping online.

This is especially true when they are embarrassed about what they are buying. It turns out that when purchasing items like antidiarrheal medicine or other embarrassing products, what customers really want is a non-human assistant.

“In general, research shows people would rather interact with a human customer service agent than a chatbot,” said Jianna Jin , who led the study as a doctoral student at Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business .

“But we found that when people are worried about others judging them, that tendency reverses and they would rather interact with a chatbot because they feel less embarrassed dealing with a chatbot than a human.”

The study was published recently in the Journal of Consumer Psychology with study co-authors Jesse Walker , assistant professor, and Rebecca Walker Reczek , professor, both in marketing at Ohio State’s Fisher College.

“Chatbots are becoming more and more common as customer service agents, and companies are not required in most states to disclose if they use them,” Reczek said. “But it may be important for companies to let consumers know if they’re dealing with a chatbot.”

In one of the five studies that was part of the Journal of Consumer Psychology paper, the researchers asked 386 undergraduate students to imagine buying either antidiarrheal or hay fever medication. They were given the choice between two online drug stores, one of which used chatbots and another that used customer service agents.

When participants were told they were buying hay fever medication, which doesn’t cause most people to feel embarrassed, 91% said they would use the store that had human service agents. But when they were buying antidiarrheal medicine, 81% chose the store with the chatbots.

In addition, it mattered how human the chatbots appeared and acted onscreen the research found.

In another part of the study, participants were asked to imagine buying an antidiarrheal medicine from an online drugstore. They were then shown one of three live chat icons: a chatbot speech bubble with no human characteristics; a cartoon chatbot of a human; or a realistic human woman.

All the chatbots clearly identified themselves to participants as AI – but the one with the cartoon of a real human used more emotional language during the exchange, such as “I am so excited to see you!”

The study found that users were more comfortable getting information about the embarrassing product from the two chatbots that were less human in appearance and behavior.

“It was as if the participants were proactively protecting themselves against embarrassment by assuming the chatbot could be human,” Walker said.

Finally, Jin designed a chatbot and had participants engage in a real back-and-forth interaction. Participants were chosen because they all strongly agreed that they wanted to make a good impression on others with their skin, suggesting they might have been interested in buying skincare products because they were embarrassed about their appearance. Based on their previous results about embarrassment, the researchers theorized the users would therefore respond more positively to clearly identified chatbots.

Participants in the study were told they were interacting with an agent for a skincare brand and whether they were talking to a chatbot or a customer service representative. Participants answered a series of questions, including one in which they were asked if they would like to provide their email address to get a free sample of the brand.

As the researchers hypothesized, participants were more likely to provide their email address if they thought they were interacting with a chatbot (62%) than a human (38%).

Walker said the results of the study suggest chatbots decrease embarrassment because consumers perceive chatbots as less able to feel emotions and make appraisals about people.

“Consumers feel less embarrassed because chatbots don’t have the level of consciousness and ability to judge them,” he said.

Jin, who is now an assistant professor at the University of Notre Dame, said the results suggest companies need to pay attention to the role of chatbots in their business, and what types of user experiences are most effective.

As conversational AI continues to get better, it may become more difficult for consumers to tell the difference between chatbots and human service agents, Reczek said. That could be a problem for companies whose customers may prefer to interact with chatbots when they perceive the subject matter to be embarrassing.

“It is going to be even more important for firms to clearly disclose that they use chatbots if they want consumers to realize they are interacting with a bot,” Reczek said.

©2024 Advance Local Media LLC. Visit cleveland.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

The Future of Consumption

How Technology, Sustainability and Wellbeing will Transform Retail and Customer Experience

• Open Access
• © 2024

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• Kristina Bäckström 0 ,
• Carys Egan-Wyer 1 ,
• Emma Samsioe 2

Department of Service Studies & Centre for Retail Research, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

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Department of Business Administration & Centre for Retail Research, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

• Discusses future trends in consumption, particularly the impact those trends will have on the ways we shop and much more
• Combines academic and practitioner perspectives on future consumption trends
• Highlights what retailers are already doing to prepare for the consumption of the future
• This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access

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About this book

This open access book presents three future consumption trends—technology, sustainability, and wellbeing—and discusses what impact those trends will have on the ways we shop. 

What will be important to the consumers of the future? And how will their retail experiences look and feel? Will technology, sustainability, and wellbeing trends fundamentally change how we consume? And how should retail managers respond to these trends in order to provide the customer experiences of the future? Blending academic perspectives with reflections from innovative retailers, this book explores all these questions and more.  

Essential reading for retail managers who want to know how future consumption trends will affect the industry, this book also benefits students and researchers of retail and consumption who want to better understand how these interdependent fields are linked. 

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Table of contents (24 chapters)

Front matter, introduction: the future of consumption.

• Kristina Bäckström, Carys Egan-Wyer, Emma Samsioe

The Intersection of Sustainability and Technology in the Context of the Digital Marketplace

• Hela Hassen, Precious Akponah

Smart Signage: Toward a Transformative Model that Effectively Generates Consumer-Product Relationships

• Franklin Velasco, Hanna Marriott

Into the Metaverse: Technological Advances Shaping the Future of Consumer and Retail Marketing

• Hossain Shahriar

Consumer Trust and Platformised Retail Personalisation

• Stefan Larsson, Kashyap Haresamudram

Friend or Foe? How Buy-Now-Pay-Later Is Seeking to Change Traditional Consumer-Retailer Relationships in the UK

• Ruffin Relja, Anita Lifen Zhao, Philippa Ward

The Future of Grocery Retail

• Rickard Sandahl

Toward a Packaging-Free Society: A Historical Journey of Institutionalization and the Way Forward

• Ozan Ağlargöz, Feyza Ağlargöz

Trending Seaweed: Future Opportunities in Retail?

• Cecilia Fredriksson, Annabell Merkel, Filippa Säwe

Grocery Retailers’ Approaches to Discussion on the Food Waste Issue on Social Media

• Ulla-Maija Sutinen, Elina Närvänen

Sustainable Consumption in Taiwan and China: Drivers and Impediments

Digitalization: a potential tool for sustainable consumption.

• Matthias Lehner, Jessika Luth Richter, Oksana Mont

The Challenge of Overproduction and Overconsumption

• Gabriella Wulff

Create Tomorrow’s Vintage

• Kevin Gelsi, Sandya Lang

The Future of Wellbeing: Value Creation in Digital Mental Health Services

• Alisa Minina Jeunemaître

No Cash, No Coins, No Cards, But You: Biohacking the Future of Payments

• Vitor Lima, Russell Belk

“I really must recommend this book, which is an insightful and topical book for all practitioners and scholars seeking answers and new perspectives on future challenges within retail and marketing. Never has the retail industry been challenged from so many different directions and it is important to be prepared for the changes that are coming. This book goes through the major trends in the retail industry: the development of technology, sustainability challenges and, finally, the future customer’s demands for better experiences. So be prepared, be updated. Read the book and you will have a huge competitive advantage for the future.” (Martin Moström, CEO, Retail House, Sweden) 

“This book is a valuable collection ofchapters by leading researchers and practitioners from a variety of fields and perspectives, exploring a range of phenomena that are likely to transform the future of consumption. It is both multifaceted and clearly structured to reflect the three key trends of technology, sustainability and well-being. These trends cover phenomena ranging from more established technologies such as digital signage to those with more uncertain trajectories such as the metaverse, from the prospects of seaweed to the challenges of reducing food waste, and from individual consumer wellbeing to digital mental health ecosystems. The book shows how each of these major trends, individually and in combination, is contributing to shape consumer experiences and retailing. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the future of consumption and is therefore highly recommended.” (Professor Johan Hagberg, University of Gothenburg, Sweden) 

“Too often we take retailing and consumption for granted. It is only when things go wrong (ranging from pandemics to global economic and geopolitical challenges) that we see how central these multi-faceted activities have become to the functioning and evolution of society. In this book, authors drawn from a wide range of backgrounds provide fascinating contemporary perspectives on the nexus between retailing and consumption. The rich variety of topics is compelling, and the insights and implications presented will prove instructive to students, academics and practitioners alike.” (Jonathan Reynolds, Said Business School, University of Oxford, UK)  

“The core purpose of retailing is to satisfy the needs and desires of consumers.  It is therefore essential that retailers keep abreast of the evolving values, expectations and behaviours of contemporary consumers.  We are in a phase of significant change in the socio-economic environment, so the need to look forward and explore new relationships andinteractions between retailers and consumers is more critical than ever.”

This edited anthology brings together an important set of insights relevant to the future of consumption and retailing.  The core to successful retailing remains the delivery of an excellent customer experience.  The need for retailing to deliver not just the ‘traditional’ values associated with products and services but to respond to important emergent themes around sustainability and wellbeing, and to consider how technology contributors to (or detracts from) delivering customer experiences based on these values will shape retailer-consumer relationships in the years ahead. (Steve Burt, Professor of Retail Marketing, Institute for Retail Studies, University of Stirling, UK) 

“The retail industry is constantly evolving, always with the fast-changing needs of the customers at heart. This book gives a great overview of how future trends within technology, sustainability and well-being can impact the development of retail. No matter if you’re a retailer or a student, it’s an interesting read with inspiring examples and best-practises that can inspire to action – both for businesses and consumers.” (Jesper Brodin, CEO Ingka Group I IKEA, Sweden)

Editors and Affiliations

Department of service studies & centre for retail research, lund university, lund, sweden.

Kristina Bäckström, Emma Samsioe

Department of Business Administration & Centre for Retail Research, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

Carys Egan-Wyer

About the editors

Kristina Bäckström is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Service Studies & Centre for Retail Research, Lund University.

Carys Egan-Wyer is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Business Administration & Centre for Retail Research, Lund University.

Emma Samsioe is an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of Service Studies & Centre for Retail Research, Lund University.

Bibliographic Information

Book Title : The Future of Consumption

Book Subtitle : How Technology, Sustainability and Wellbeing will Transform Retail and Customer Experience

Editors : Kristina Bäckström, Carys Egan-Wyer, Emma Samsioe

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33246-3

Publisher : Palgrave Macmillan Cham

eBook Packages : Business and Management , Business and Management (R0)

Copyright Information : The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2024

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-031-33245-6 Published: 05 October 2023

Softcover ISBN : 978-3-031-33248-7 Published: 05 October 2023

eBook ISBN : 978-3-031-33246-3 Published: 04 October 2023

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : XXIX, 383

Number of Illustrations : 8 b/w illustrations, 18 illustrations in colour

Topics : Marketing , Trade

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