Customer Service

Why calls still matter in retail

Learn how you can build an omnichannel marketing funnel using retail customer experiences during phone calls. Synergize lead and phone call campaigns.

Photo: Adobe Stock

December 22, 2025 by Victoria Berezhetska — Content Lead, Phonexa

Whether you're buying customer calls, selling them or generating them on your own, the success of your business largely depends on how smooth the customer journey is at every stage: read customer experiences.

The more user-friendly your marketing pipeline is, the more callers become clients and the more data from customer calls you collect to optimize your campaigns.

It's quite obvious satisfied callers tend to convert into paying customers and are more eager to share the details that you can use to zero in on your best audiences, traffic channels, campaigns and partners. Even for web leads, they must have an opportunity to make a call when they want and get it resolved in the shortest time without having to jump through hoops.

Phone calls: Retail customer experiences, conversion rates

It's no secret that happy callers generate more profits, but how do you make them happy exactly? How do you ensure every caller is on an optimal, personalized path to conversion, receiving the right marketing and assistance throughout the purchase cycle?

Here are a few things you can do to improve retail phone call experiences:

• Use IVR systems to scale it up and minimize call queues.
• Use AI call agents to provide human-like experiences for all customer calls.
• Use a call tracking & analytics software to personalize caller journeys based on data.
• Use predictive modeling software to identify your best marketing strategies in a safe way.

Combine all of that, and you'll be able to develop a data-driven phone call system and even coordinate it with your web lead acquisition campaigns, email and social media marketing, among other marketing avenues. Then every customer gets what they expect while smoothly transitioning between touch points, like from on-site experiences to phone calls and back.

Let's unwrap how you can use each of the mentioned tools to improve retail CX.

#1. Interactive Voice Response System

Even a classic IVR system — press 1 for account information, press 2 to speak to a customer support representative, press 3 to repeat this menu — is of great help to both callers and companies, enabling a certain level of self-service and reducing call queues.

And, of course, you can add more options, depending on your call routing structure and the data you've collected before the call goes to the IVR. The business logic, though, remains the same — decreasing the load on your live operators and enabling auto-resolutions for simpler requests.

Practical advice: If you're a call-reliant business, get an IVR system as the backbone for your call campaigns and make sure it's compatible with AI call agents so you can take it a step further if needed. Even the simplest IVR is a great way to separate transactional and non-transactional customer calls.

#2. AI call agents

With the development of AI, you can transform static, pre-scripted retail customer experiences into dynamic, humanlike conversations built in real time by AI call agents, which are essentially algorithms that combine NLP technologies.

AI call agents speak to callers naturally, using both pre-trained patterns and — most importantly — the conversation's context. As a result, each caller receives personalized guidance tailored to their unique needs and preferences.

Likewise, AI call agents are great for sifting out low-quality, irrelevant, duplicate and downright fraudulent calls, and for keeping accepted calls within a reasonable line of conversation. You set the initial guardrails and scripts, train the agent on industry-specific data, and then it can effectively identify learning patterns, update its algorithms and process more customer calls.

Practical Advice: Some call management software suites support free integration of AI Call agents as a block or modules within an IVR system. Having such software will allow you to experiment and give callers an alternative between doing it old-school with keypad selection or by voice.

#3. Call tracking and analytics software

The amount and depth of insights you can collect before, during, and after the call largely determine the accuracy of call distribution and ultimately, customer experiences and whether the caller converts into a paying client. This is why you need call tracking software as the backbone of your call processing system.

Here are some of the data an advanced call tracking solution can collect:

• Source insights: where is a call coming from — traffic source, campaign, etc.
• Caller insights: the caller's demographics, psychographics or firmographics
• Conversation insights: call timestamp, outcome, keywords, etc.

At the end of the day, having a real-time call tracking system can ensure you only accept qualified phone calls and discard customer calls that don't match your expectations. Likewise, based on the collected data, you can distribute callers to the best-matching sales or customer support reps.

Imagine a solar installation business acquiring phone calls. It's only logical that you'd like to get callers only from states where you actually operate, and maybe verify the caller's location by, say, comparing the location on a form with an IP-derived location. Then you can be almost 100% sure that your on-site crew can successfully reach the consumer.

Practical Advice: If you want to identify your best callers, or you're purchasing or selling calls within a competitive market, get call tracking software that can check inbound phone calls in real-time as quickly as possible and then qualify or disqualify customer calls based on these checks. Such software will give you an advantage over other advertisers or publishers hunting for the same leads.

#4. Identify your most profitable campaigns with predictive modeling

Whether you're generating phone calls with paid ads, organically, or even buying them, the predictive modeling software — something you can find as part of advanced call management systems — can provide you with data-driven insights into campaigns you're about to launch.

In practice, using predictive modeling software boils down to analyzing historical patterns — all the data you've accumulated throughout the history of accepting customer calls — and then introducing different variables (platforms, ad types, timings, audiences, marketing assets, etc.) to simulate outcomes. Then, out of hundreds of simulations, you can choose the ones that work best and try them in the real market with much less risk. And you can A/B test them as well to reduce risks even further.

Web, phone call customer experiences as a single whole

Last but not least, since most customer journeys are omnichannel — the same user may first fill out a form, then engage with your marketing email, and then make a call — it's crucial to ensure consistent experiences across marketing channels and touch points.

For that, a comprehensive lead generation ecosystem would be the best solution. With such a system, you'd be able to factor in the entire customer journey, not just its web or phone call segment, leading to a coherence of perception and ultimately, more conversions and sales.

About Victoria Berezhetska

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