Working in retail support means answering similar questions hundreds of times a day. Order status, returns, promo codes, shipping updates. These are routine requests with routine solutions, and customers know it. What they want is an immediate resolution.

A 2025 consumer survey conducted by Forethought examined how retail customers choose support channels and what they expect from each one. The findings point to an opportunity that retail CX teams are uniquely positioned to capture.

Retail Customers Prefer Voice, but Not for the Reason You’d Think

Nobody loves calling customer service. The wait times are long, the phone trees are maddening, and there's always a chance you'll get transferred three times before someone hangs up on you.

Our consumer survey shows that when retail customers need help, 35% still reach for the phone, which is more than any other channel. It also shows it’s because they believe voice is the only channel where two things happen at once:

1. Someone understands the problem
2. And someone fixes it.

Fifty-eight percent of consumers say an agent is more likely to understand them if they can talk through the issue, and 53% say it’s faster, while 60% say phone is the most effective channel for actually getting something resolved. What this tells us is that consumers want empathy and resolution, together, in real time. They call because they don't trust any other channel to deliver both.

This is the gap agentic AI was built to close. The AI traditionally used in chatbots, which many companies thought would replace voice altogether, can answer questions. But answering isn't the same as resolving. An agentic system can do both by taking actions like pulling live shipping data, explaining the delay, offering options to reroute or cancel, and executing the customer's choice.

Forethought’s 2025 AI in CX Benchmark Report finds that companies using agentic AI report a 44% deflection rate, compared to 33% for non-agentic companies. For simple issues, the smallest support teams saw a 71% higher deflection rate with agentic AI than without any AI.

Forethought’s voice agent brings agentic AI to the phone. It reasons through problems, integrates with backend systems, and resolves issues as a skilled agent would. The companies seeing the best results are the ones that connected Voice to systems like their order management, CRM, and fulfillment systems so it could actually take action, not just talk.

Retail Customers Are More Open to Chat Than Anyone Else

Retail is the only industry where chat comes close to matching phone as the preferred support channel. That same consumer survey found that 32% of retail customers prefer chat over a call, compared with 35% who still prefer voice. That three-point gap is the narrowest of any industry in the study.

The nature of retail support helps explain why chat feels more viable. Most support requests in the industry are repeatable and straightforward. When the survey asked consumers specifically about where they would prefer to resolve an issue about order tracking, the preference split was nearly a dead tie at 30% phone and 29% chat. For simple, transactional issues, customers are willing to type rather than speak, provided they believe the channel can deliver a resolution.

The problem is that when asked what they expect from customer support chat, the number one answer was "connect me to a human agent" at 33%. That ranked higher than "solve my issue" (29%) and "answer my question" (19%). Customers have instead started using chat as a stepping stone to a real conversation, because too often the bot can only point them to an FAQ or ask them to repeat themselves.

Where traditional chatbots deflect inquiries by surfacing content or routing them to a human, agentic AI-powered chatbots can actually execute the tasks customers ask about. When the AI can take action rather than just answer questions, chat becomes a channel for resolution.

Cotopaxi Chat Support is Thriving Because It’s Able to Take Action

Cotopaxi, an outdoor gear retailer, recently replaced its old chatbot with Forethought's Solve. Most of what their customers’ issues are things like order tracking, returns, product questions, and promo codes.

The issue with their previous setup was that customers had to navigate rigid category menus before they could get anywhere. By the time they found the right option, they were already frustrated. The switch to Forethought’s chat agent allowed customers to type questions naturally, and the system would route them based on intent. Because the AI was integrated directly with Kustomer and Shopify, it had real context on what the customer had ordered, when it shipped, and what the return window looked like.

"In all of our intents, we have a fallback set that a consumer can opt to speak with our CX team if needed," Bron Rasmussen, CX Operations at Cotopaxi, told Forethought. "Many of the messages we get can be deflected by our bot and get the consumer a resolution quickly, but there are always going to be tickets that just need a real human to help solve or talk the customer through."

In the first six months of using Forethought in 2024, Cotopaxi increased its deflection rate by 28%, and maintained a 4.5 CSAT. They kept headcount steady through the holiday season even as they grew.

Resolution Is the Only Measurement of Success That Matters

Retail customers have always been willing to use chat or voice. The channels, in a way, are irrelevant. What is relevant is the speed at which their problems are resolved. Right now, they’re turning to voice because that’s where they think they have the best chance at achieving both.

But agentic AI has the potential to provide speed, empathy and completion across all channels. It’s ability to take action within your retail systems means it can take on a meaningful portion of your support load, so you can scale without more resources.

Forethought is built to help retail CX teams make that shift. Request a demo to see how Forethought resolves retail support issues across every channel.