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retail
AI agents and trained specialists handle store hours, inventory checks, loyalty programs, and post-purchase support across every channel your customers use.
The short version: put AI on store hours, stock checks and loyalty balances; put a person on returns that cross channels, complaints about a named associate, and any order that is going to be late. AI voice is $0.15 a minute, chat $0.15 a session, a shared human agent $300 a month for 500 minutes, half-seat minimum. Five days is our normal window to staff your account. And one limit up front: we can only be as accurate as your stock system.
how it plays out
Customer calling before driving 30 minutes
Cross-channel exchange request
Customer has accumulated points but never redeemed
Complaint about in-store experience at flagship location
the team behind it
real members of the global team Retail-Trained Specialists
65+ Languages
Follow-the-Sun Coverage
the part nobody prices in
Every other industry on this site treats an inbound contact as a cost. Retail is the one where it is often the opposite. When a person rings to ask whether you have an item, they have already decided to buy it — the only open question is from whom. They are holding a phone, they are within driving distance, and the answer has a shelf life measured in hours.
This is why deflection metrics do so much damage here. A bot that closes 60% of contacts in a retail queue has not saved you 60% of the cost; it has, some meaningful share of the time, ended a conversation that was about to become a basket. The cheapest support queue is the one nobody calls, and in retail that is also the emptiest store.
The second thing that makes retail different is that a wrong answer has a physical cost, paid by the customer. Tell someone the shelf has it when it does not, and they spend twenty minutes of their Saturday finding out you were wrong. They do not file a ticket about it. They stop believing your stock page, which is the thing that was bringing them in.
So the honest version of what we sell is narrower than most vendors would print. We can answer at the hours your store cannot, in the languages your neighbourhood speaks, and be careful about the difference between "the system shows two" and "we have it." What we cannot do is make your counts true. If they are wrong, we make the wrongness arrive faster.
who takes which call
Most vendors sell you either an AI receptionist or a live answering service and leave the allocation to you. Since we run both, here is the split we would actually recommend — including the calls we think should never touch automation.
| The call | Route to | Cost of getting it wrong |
|---|---|---|
| "What time do you close on Sunday?" | AI | A caller who drives to a closed store |
| "Do you have this in a 10 at the Denver store?" | AI | A sale that walks to whoever answers |
| Loyalty balance, gift card balance, receipt resend | AI | A member who stops using the card |
| "I bought it in-store and want to return it online" | Human | A refund argued in public afterwards |
| "Your associate was rude to me" | Human | A review naming a person by name |
| A ship-from-store order that is going to be late | Human | A legal obligation missed, not just a delay |
| Caller says the item was in stock online but not on the shelf | Human | A wasted trip you will pay for twice |
what it costs
Most vendors in this category quote by form. These are our published packages — not a quote, since language mix, hours and volume all move the number. The per-minute figures are simply the monthly price divided by the included minutes.
| Option | Published price | Per minute | What it's for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Live shared team | from $650 / month | includes 1,500 min → ≈ $0.43/min | The week after a promotion, when volume triples and your floor staff cannot pick up |
| AI voice | $0.15 | per minute | Store hours, holiday hours, "is this in stock at my local store" |
| Web chat | $0.15 | per session | Calls that arrive after the doors close, when the store phone rings out |
| Live shared team | from $300 / month | includes 500 min → ≈ $0.60/min | Loyalty points, gift cards and receipt lookups |
| Dedicated agent | from $5.80 | per hour, per agent | One team that knows your return window, your price-match rule and which stores carry what |
Anything involving a person is a starting price. Two things move it: which languages you need, and how senior an agent the work actually requires — a bilingual agent handling refund authority is not the same hire as one taking bookings. AI voice and web chat are flat, because there is no hiring in them. And every model above is open to every business on this page: which one fits is a question about the shape of your volume, not about your industry.
Minimum engagement is half a seat — not a five-seat block. We also bill per resolved issue, from $1, where you pay nothing if it is not resolved; that model fits businesses where a customer problem actually gets solved on the call, not businesses where the call is intake.
do the arithmetic yourself
Pull a week of inbound calls and sort them into two piles: people asking whether to come in, and everything else. Call the first pile V. Those are not support contacts — they are footfall you have already earned, and you are deciding whether to pay $0.15 to collect it. Multiply V by your average basket and compare it to what the whole queue costs. For most retailers it is not close.
This is the reverse of the calculation an ecommerce brand runs. There the goal is fewer contacts per order, because a contact means something went wrong with an order that already exists. In a store the contact often comes before the order exists, and suppressing it suppresses the order. A vendor pitching deflection rate is quoting an ecommerce metric at a business that is not ecommerce.
The pile that is pure cost — returns, complaints, receipt hunting, "where is my ship-from-store order" — is real, and worth handling cheaply where it can be. But it is a different pile with a different target, and the common mistake is one blended cost-per-contact number covering both. One pile you want smaller. The other you want answered.
setup
Five days is our normal window to staff a live account — that is five days to find and place an agent who fits your business, not five days of software setup. AI voice can go live sooner because there is no hiring step.
your existing software
Amazon through the SP-API, two-way with Shopify, plus eBay — so an agent handling a case can see the order, the shipment and the return without asking the customer to repeat the number. WhatsApp, LINE and TikTok come into the same queue as email and chat. If a platform is missing from that list, ask before you assume: we will tell you straight whether we connect today or whether it needs building.
your existing software
Amazon 
Shopify 
eBay 
WhatsApp 
LINE 
TikTok Running something else? Tell us what it is and we will say straight whether we connect to it today or whether it needs building.
what comes off the call
Most of this is one afternoon of somebody in operations exporting things they already have. It is also the difference between an agent who sounds like your store and one who sounds like a call centre.
The stock line is the one that decides how useful we can be. An agent reading a feed that updates nightly is a different service from one who can ring the floor.
where AI should not be
"Your associate was rude to me."
This is about a person who works for you, whose name the caller may be about to put in a review. It needs someone who can listen without defending, take it down accurately, and get it to the right manager — and it needs to not sound like a form.
An in-store purchase coming back through an online channel.
Two systems, two receipts, often two different return windows, and a customer who reasonably thinks it is one company. Automation resolves this by picking whichever rule is written down, which is how a refund becomes an argument in public.
A ship-from-store order that will be late.
The obligation here is to reach out and offer a cancellation before the customer asks, and getting that wrong is not a service failure — it is a rule breach. A person should own the call and the wording.
"It said in stock online and the shelf was empty."
The caller has already made a trip for nothing. Anything that reads as a scripted apology confirms exactly what they suspect. This one is repaired by a human doing something concrete — locating it elsewhere, holding it, sending it — or not repaired at all.
a model we're not selling you
Deflection rate is the headline number in most support proposals: what share of contacts we close without a person. It is a genuinely useful number in ecommerce and in software, where a contact is a symptom of something already sold and already wrong. Sold to a retailer, it is the wrong metric pointed at the wrong pile.
The problem is that deflection is measured without regard to what the contact was worth. A stock check a bot answers well and one a bot ends badly both count as deflected. The number rises the same way whether we are serving your customers or losing them — and a vendor paid against it has no reason to look closer.
Which is why on this page we quote per-minute and per-session for the volume that is genuinely routine, and put a shared or dedicated person on the pile where the money actually is. Every model in our price list stays open — including per resolution, from $1, which fits the returns-and-receipts side of a retail queue rather well. What we will not do is put a deflection target in a retail contract and call it a service level.
when we're the wrong choice
questions
AI voice is $0.15 per minute and web chat is $0.15 per session. Live agents start at $300 per month including 500 minutes — about $0.60 per minute — or from $5.80 per hour for a dedicated agent working only your account. The minimum engagement is half a seat, not a five-seat block.
Five days is our normal window to staff a live account — that is five days to find and place an agent who fits your business, not five days of software setup. AI voice can go live sooner because there is no hiring step.
Yes, on the same number, with agents in our Bolivia and Nicaragua operation centres — native Spanish, not machine translation. English and Spanish share one queue, and we cover 60+ more languages if you need them.
That is the normal setup. You decide which call types go to AI and which reach a person, and you can change the split as your volume changes. Nothing about that decision is locked in at signup.
You are, and sooner than most retailers realise. Once you take orders by phone or online, the FTC Mail, Internet, or Telephone Order Merchandise Rule (law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/16/435.2) requires that if you cannot ship within the time you advertised — or within thirty days if you advertised none — you offer the buyer the choice of consenting to the delay or cancelling for a prompt refund, and that offer must be made without prior demand. The obligation is to reach out first, not to answer well when they call. That is a support workflow, not a warehouse one — and it is the thing an understaffed store phone never gets to.
Only as accurately as your system knows. We read the same stock figure your associates read, and we will say "the system shows two, I would call the store to have one held" rather than promise a customer a drive. If your counts are routinely wrong, outsourcing support makes the problem faster, not smaller — we would rather tell you that in the first conversation.
We will take an order, hold an item, and tell someone what else you carry in that size. We are not a commissioned sales floor and we do not run scripts written to upsell. If you want outbound selling with a quota attached, that is a different service and a different kind of person — say so and we will tell you whether we are the right shop.
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We will show you how AI and specialists keep retail support running around the clock.