In today’s hypercompetitive ecommerce landscape, great products and smooth logistics are just table stakes. What really sets winning retailers apart is customer experience: fast, helpful, and personalised service that meets shoppers where they already are.
That means moving beyond reactive, ticket-based support to something more dynamic: real-time, messaging-first experiences that feel intuitive, conversational, and effortless. Whether customers are checking return policies, tracking orders, or getting product recommendations, they want it fast, mobile-first, and personal.
But delivering that kind of service at scale is tough, especially when ecommerce teams are stretched thin and customer expectations are at an all-time high.
That’s why many retailers are turning to automation, chat-based channels, and strategic CX design to create digital journeys that feel as personal as shopping with a trusted store associate. In this article, we’ll show you how.
What today’s ecommerce landscape demands from CX teams
To understand what’s really driving ecommerce CX in 2025, we spoke with Enara Urlezaga, Global Experience Manager at Veepee-Privalia. With more than a decade of experience in CRM, loyalty, and retention, she leads multilingual support teams across markets, focused on delivering high-quality, scalable customer experiences.
Her insights clarify that improving customer experience is no longer optional. It’s a competitive differentiator and a growth lever.
Customer loyalty is harder to earn and easier to lose
With online shopping now the norm, competition is fiercer than ever. DTC brands, international marketplaces, and ecommerce-first retailers have redefined what "good" looks like. And shoppers? They're holding brands to those standards.
“We live in an era where customers can access products and services anywhere in the world at a ‘click’ distance,” says Enara. “This means that for many companies, your competitor is no longer just your local competitor, it is also a lot of potentially best-in-class international companies.”
Customers are more selective, less tolerant of poor service, and more likely to churn after a single bad interaction. That’s why loyalty can’t be taken for granted, it must be actively earned at every touchpoint.
Customer care must evolve beyond cost-centre thinking
Enara understands support teams should not be seen as overhead.
“Every customer contact that is properly managed by an efficient customer care area has a high probability of becoming a loyal customer,” she explains. It’s no secret that loyal customers are more likely to purchase again and to recommend products and businesses.
Retailers that treat service as a strategic asset—not just a problem-solving function—can transform it into a revenue driver. That means shifting focus from volume-based metrics to outcomes like satisfaction, resolution, and loyalty.
Too many companies are stuck measuring the wrong things. As Enara puts it: “It is so important to consider ‘customer experience’ metrics such as CSAT, CES, and resolution, to make sure that your operations are aligned with what customers expect from your company.”
Technology is key to faster, smarter service
Meeting rising expectations at scale isn’t possible without the right tech. Enara emphasises the importance of modernising contact centres, especially with tools that support messaging, automation, and data integration.
It’s vital for retailers to adapt to emerging technologies, particularly as they relate to customer service. Today’s winning brands offer faster, more convenient support through non-traditional channels like messaging and chat.
“As we all know, what worked yesterday will not necessarily drive success today. I think that the strategies, metrics, processes, and investments leveraged in the phone-only ‘cost centre’ days will not guarantee success in the current scenario.”
For Veepee-Privalia, this meant investing in conversational apps and tools that could support asynchronous interactions, intelligent routing, and proactive engagement without sacrificing efficiency or control.
5 tips for operationalising great ecommerce customer service
The path from CX strategy to results lies in how well you execute. We spoke with Rob van den Boogaard, Director of Client Onboarding at GEC Digital, who’s helped global retailers streamline their operations and enhance customer service through technology. Here are five takeaways to help teams turn big CX ideas into real performance gains:
1. Modernise your backend to stay agile
Legacy systems like ERP platforms were never built for real-time, omnichannel ecommerce. Rob recommends building modern ecommerce tech stacks that benefit modular, API-first architectures that let you plug in best-of-breed tools without rebuilding everything.
“You still have some of the old brands trying to run ecommerce from ERP systems, which has never worked and will never work.”
API-first strategies let you experiment, iterate, and evolve your CX stack without disrupting the business. This is especially important as new channels like messaging become central to the customer journey.
2. Break silos between marketing and customer service
Customers don’t care which team owns which channel. If they see your Instagram campaign and reply with a product question, they expect a fast, relevant response.
“Marketing uses Instagram to broadcast. But if someone replies, customer service needs to pick it up. Customers don’t see departments—they see a brand.”
Rob urges brands to coordinate social and support strategies, especially on channels like WhatsApp and Messenger where marketing and support converge.
3. Focus on CSAT, not reducing contacts
Reducing contact volume isn't the goal—improving outcomes is. Rob stresses that high contact volume can be a positive signal of engagement. The opportunity lies in reducing average handle time and increasing CSAT with better tools and training.
“It’s a blessing when people reach out. That contact fuels business intelligence and helps shape smarter marketing.”
4. Empower your agents to drive self-service
Your support team knows what customers ask for, so give them ownership of proactive support content like FAQs, help widgets, and web forms. Rob notes that when agents control this content, it reduces repetitive contacts and boosts efficiency.
“When marketing creates FAQ content, they often create it before they launch a website and never look at it again (unless someone asks). But if you give this to your customer service team, they keep it sharp because they have skin in the game.”
5. Don’t treat every market the same
Rob cautions against assuming one-size-fits-all approaches work across geographies. Language support, agent availability, and even channel mix should vary based on order volume, CX cost structures, and customer expectations.
“If you’re getting 10 orders a day from a country, it’s probably not worth hiring a local team and translating everything. Look at the ROI first.”
Building a modern customer experience strategy in ecommerce
Ecommerce brands need customer experience (CX) strategies that are proactive, data-driven, and built for scale. Drawing from Enara’s experience, here are the foundations of a modern, high-performing CX strategy.
What great CX looks like in today’s ecommerce landscape
- Start with a clear CX vision and shared goals
The most successful retailers align teams—internal and external—around a common definition of service excellence. A strong vision acts as a compass for daily decisions, helping teams stay focused on customer needs even as operations scale. - Track metrics that matter to the customer
Operational KPIs like AHT or SLA still matter, but they’re no longer enough. Brands need to incorporate experience-led metrics like CSAT, CES, and resolution rate to ensure their service is aligned with what customers actually care about. - Design for flexibility and seasonality
CX teams must be ready to adapt quickly to changes in volume or demand. This includes training multilingual, cross-market agents and designing playbooks that help scale support across peak shopping periods without compromising quality. - Use messaging channels to meet customers where they are
With the majority of traffic now coming from mobile, messaging is no longer optional. Channels like WhatsApp or Messenger offer asynchronous, conversational experiences that feel natural and convenient, especially when enhanced with automation.
If you don’t want to miss out on all of Enara’s insights, make sure to check out her full webinar!
Personalisation in Action: How Sephora Sets the Standard for Digital CX
One of the most recognised examples of digital-first personalisation in retail is Sephora. For several years, the beauty brand ranked #1 on Sailthru’s Retail Personalization Index for how well it connects customer experiences across email, apps, ecommerce, and in-store touchpoints.
What sets Sephora apart is not just the breadth of its channels, but how intelligently and conversationally it ties them together. Here’s how the brand turns technology into tailored CX:
Booking beauty services through conversational interfaces
Sephora’s Reservation Assistant makes booking in-store services as simple as chatting with a friend. Through a conversational interface, customers state what service they need and where, and the assistant suggests the nearest location and available time slots. This conversational flow—powered by natural language processing (NLP)—reduces friction and makes the experience feel intuitive.
In-store tech that personalises on the spot
In stores, Sephora’s Color Match tool uses augmented reality to recommend foundations and matching lip or eye products based on the customer’s skin tone. This experience is enhanced through messaging integration (e.g. Facebook Messenger), enabling continued engagement and recommendations post-visit.
An app that acts like a personal assistant
Sephora’s mobile app is not just for shopping—it’s a loyalty hub, store guide, and real-time assistant. Customers can check stock, get notified when wishlist items are nearby, book appointments, or present their loyalty ID in-store. The app bridges digital and physical journeys, all while learning from user behaviour to make smarter suggestions.
Gamified quizzes that enhance recommendations
Sephora uses interactive quizzes to engage customers and collect useful data points about their preferences. This data is then used to tailor messaging—automatically triggering relevant product suggestions through chat, without the need for manual filtering or guesswork.
Loyalty that fuels personalisation
The Beauty Insider programme is another layer in Sephora’s CX engine. More than a reward system, it’s a data-rich environment that fuels hyper-personalised recommendations and communications across channels—especially through conversational touchpoints like WhatsApp and Messenger.
Takeaway: Sephora’s success shows that when CX is built around personalisation and powered by conversational technology, customer satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty follow. The tools it uses—from chatbots to AR—are not just tech gimmicks, but part of a strategy that puts the customer at the centre of every channel.
How Hubtype helps ecommerce teams turn CX into a growth engine
While strategy sets the foundation, execution depends on the right technology. Hubtype enables retailers to deliver highly personalised, omnichannel experiences without sacrificing scalability or efficiency. Here’s how:
- Sales AI Agents that guide and convert
Our Sales AI Agents replicate the role of expert in-store associates within messaging channels. They understand intent, personalise recommendations, and guide users from product discovery to checkout—all in one continuous conversation. - Support that spans the entire customer lifecycle
From pre-sale assistance to post-purchase care and re-engagement campaigns, Hubtype helps brands create connected customer journeys that drive satisfaction and long-term loyalty. - Truly omnichannel execution, without silos
Our platform integrates across messaging apps, CRMs, order systems, and knowledge bases, ensuring every interaction is informed by customer data and context, no matter where it starts. This adds to the omnichannel customer support shoppers expect. - Personalisation at scale
Automation handles FAQs and routing, while human agents focus on high-impact moments. With unified profiles and smart routing, every customer gets relevant, timely support.
With Hubtype, retailers don’t just improve customer experience—they use it to increase conversion, reduce service costs, and build meaningful relationships at scale.
The role of messaging and chat in online retail
For Veepee-Privalia, messaging played an important role to improve ecommerce customer experience. Enara reminded us that 89% of consumers want to use messaging to communicate with businesses.
With most of Veepee-Privalia’s traffic coming from mobile devices, meeting customers on mobile channels became a top priority.
“Needless to say, in a mobile-first world, messaging services are one of the preferred channels of our customers,” says Enara.
Messaging improves customer experience metrics
There were two main reasons why Veepee-Privalia decided to invest in messaging channels. The first one was the clear demand for service on messaging channels, and the second was the promise of increasing customer satisfaction.
“Demand growth came in through conversational channels, especially through Facebook Messenger. This is when we realised that we needed to prepare ourselves to handle these conversational channels,” explained Enara.
What’s more, customers who were being helped through Facebook were generally happier. “In a nutshell, we saw that customers wanted to contact us through these channels and were very satisfied after contacting us”, explained Enara.
“After less than a year, we have more than doubled the share of conversational channels in our channel mix, with very positive results in terms of productivity and especially CSAT.”
Messaging Channels Are Becoming the Backbone of Customer Experience
Customers now expect to communicate with brands just as they would with friends, quickly, informally, and on their own terms. Messaging delivers on this expectation, combining speed, ease, and flexibility in a way that traditional channels simply can’t.
With more than 2 billion monthly active users, WhatsApp leads this shift. And it’s not just consumers who are embracing it—over 500 million businesses now use WhatsApp every day to interact with their customers. Whether answering questions, sending updates, or completing transactions, messaging is no longer a side channel. It’s where customer journeys begin and often end.
Asynchronous by nature, messaging allows customers to reach out whenever it suits them, without waiting on hold or refreshing their inbox. It supports everything from real-time chat to rich interactions like product carousels, payment flows, and even identity verification.
The takeaway? Messaging is not just a channel—it’s a powerful, evolving interface that improves satisfaction, drives sales, and keeps brands close to their customers throughout the entire lifecycle.
Want to see how messaging can elevate your ecommerce experience?
Book a demo and discover the difference conversational channels can make.
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