From Traditional Service to AI-Led Retail Operations

Retail service leaders are under pressure from every direction. Customers expect immediate, personalized support across chat, email, web and in-store touchpoints. Service teams, meanwhile, are often working across fragmented tools, disconnected data and scripted bots that solve only the simplest requests. The result is a service model that is costly to run, difficult to scale and too often disconnected from the brand experience retailers work so hard to create.

The opportunity is much bigger than incremental contact center improvement. With the right combination of strategy, workflow design, systems integration and agentic AI, service can evolve from a reactive support function into an always-on experience engine—one that resolves common inquiries intelligently, escalates complex issues with full context and enables human experts to focus where empathy, judgment and commercial value matter most.

At Publicis Sapient, we help retailers make that shift by combining our SPEED capabilities—Strategy, Product, Experience, Engineering, and Data & AI—with deep Salesforce expertise. The goal is not to bolt AI onto broken processes. It is to redesign service end to end so retailers can deliver faster resolution, more personalized engagement and stronger business outcomes.

Many retailers still operate with service environments shaped by past constraints. Knowledge is spread across systems. Agents toggle between multiple tools to resolve a single issue. Legacy platforms require heavy customization and are hard to adapt. Self-service experiences are often rigid and transactional, leaving customers stuck in loops before they finally reach a human.

These gaps become even more visible during peak periods, when high inquiry volumes create bottlenecks and long response times. Routine requests such as order status, returns, delivery updates, jewelry care, product availability or appointment changes absorb valuable agent time. At the same time, service teams have less capacity for the emotionally nuanced, high-consideration or high-value interactions that define premium retail experiences.

Retailers need a model that connects channels, data and workflows so service becomes simpler for both customers and employees. That starts with a clear roadmap.

Before AI can deliver meaningful value, retailers need a connected operational core. That means consolidating customer context, case history, order data, inventory information and knowledge into an environment that agents and AI can both access. Salesforce Service Cloud provides a strong foundation for this, especially when integrated with commerce, order management and customer data platforms.

Publicis Sapient helps retailers reduce dependence on disparate systems by designing integrated service architectures that support a single view of the customer and a more seamless case-handling experience. In one customer service modernization program, our teams replaced a legacy platform with Salesforce Service Cloud, built more than 15 integrations, expanded the data available to representatives and reduced the need to jump across systems to complete cases. The impact was faster resolution, fewer clicks and a better agent experience.

Once the foundation is in place, retailers can move beyond basic chatbots toward AI agents that actually resolve common inquiries. This is where agentic AI begins to change the economics of service. Instead of relying on scripted decision trees, retailers can deploy conversational agents that understand intent, retrieve context from connected systems and respond in natural language.

For retailers, the first wave of value often comes from high-volume, repeatable use cases: “Where is my order?”, return and refund questions, product care guidance, appointment changes, store details and simple post-purchase support. When these interactions are handled quickly and accurately, customers get faster answers and service specialists regain time for more complex work.

Pandora’s transformation shows what this can look like in practice. Working with Salesforce and Publicis Sapient, the brand introduced an AI-powered customer service agent that automates routine queries and connects to Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud and its order management environment to provide real-time updates. The result was 60% autonomous case deflection, allowing specialists to focus on higher-value interactions, alongside a 10% uplift in Net Promoter Score.

AI-led service does not mean eliminating the human role. It means using AI to determine when a human should step in—and ensuring that when they do, they are not starting from zero. The most effective service models use AI to gather context, summarize intent, capture prior actions and route cases intelligently.

This is especially important in retail, where emotionally charged or commercially significant moments still benefit from human expertise: a damaged gift order, a high-value purchase decision, a loyalty issue, a sensitive complaint or a store fulfillment exception. Publicis Sapient designs service journeys where AI and humans work in sequence, not in silos. AI handles the routine, prepares the case and passes forward relevant context so human agents can focus on resolution, reassurance and relationship-building.

As maturity grows, AI-led service can support more than issue resolution. It can help retailers create proactive, revenue-supporting interactions that feel more like guided experiences than contact center transactions. With connected data and well-designed workflows, service agents—digital and human—can anticipate needs, recommend relevant products, support cross-channel fulfillment and improve conversion during high-intent moments.

This is where the line between service and commerce begins to blur in the right way. Pandora complemented its service agent with a personal shopper agent designed to help customers find the right piece based on occasion, recipient and budget. Powered by connected data across commerce, experience and customer platforms, the experience brought more of the warmth and personalization of in-store conversations into digital channels.

For retailers, that same pattern can extend across use cases such as product discovery, replenishment reminders, appointment preparation, post-purchase care and assisted selling. Service becomes a channel for loyalty, conversion and lifetime value—not just containment.

Longer term, leading retailers will move beyond isolated bots to connected, multi-agent service ecosystems. In this model, specialized agents can collaborate across tasks such as authentication, order lookup, knowledge retrieval, rescheduling, fulfillment coordination and recommendation generation. Human agents remain a critical part of the system, but they are supported by AI that can orchestrate work, simplify workflows and accelerate decision-making.

Publicis Sapient’s perspective is clear: transformation happens when retailers stop solving friction point by friction point and instead design for the full spectrum of interaction models—customer to agent, agent to agent, human to AI and human-AI-human loops. This is how contact centers become proactive, scalable and experience-led.

Technology alone is not enough. Sustainable service transformation requires experience design, agile delivery, strong governance and the ability to integrate across the enterprise. Publicis Sapient brings these elements together by combining Salesforce expertise with workflow redesign, data integration and a human-centered approach to AI adoption.

Our work with retailers has shown that better service outcomes depend on better operational design underneath: common codebases that increase release velocity, cloud-based order management that improves inventory visibility and fulfillment, and service platforms that give both people and AI access to the right information at the right time. When these pieces connect, retailers gain the agility to launch new capabilities in weeks instead of months and the resilience to keep improving as customer expectations evolve.

The future of retail service is not human-only, and it is not AI-only. It is human-centered and AI-led. It is built on connected data, intelligent workflows and service experiences that resolve issues quickly while creating moments of trust, convenience and commercial value.

For service leaders, the path forward is clear: modernize the foundation, automate routine work intelligently, escalate with context and expand service into a connected ecosystem that supports both experience and growth. Retailers that make this shift can free their experts to do what humans do best while giving customers the faster, more seamless support they increasingly expect.

That is how service moves from a fragmented function to a strategic differentiator—and how Publicis Sapient helps retailers turn customer operations into a true engine of loyalty, efficiency and revenue.

Relevant Links

• Reimagining In-Store Magic: Pandora’s Agentforce Journey with Publicis Sapient
• Reimagining In-Store Magic: Pandora’s Agentforce Journey with Publicis Sapient
• AI-Powered Retail Transformation in APAC: Building Scalable Foundations for Local Growth
• Omnichannel Fulfillment: The Operational Backbone of Trusted AI in Jewelry Retail
• Agentic AI on the Store Floor: Empowering the Retail Frontline
• Retail européen : transformer l’engagement client grâce à l’IA, à l’omnicanalité et à une exécution agile (Europe)
• Retail en América Latina: cómo convertir la atención y la omnicanalidad en motores de crecimiento con IA (LATAM)