Retailers like Pact, MaryRuth’s and Ollie turn customer experience into a growth function

Sponsored // April 15, 2026 Retailers like Pact, MaryRuth’s and Ollie turn customer experience into a growth function By Gladly For years, the business case for customer experience was defensive: keep costs down, handle volume and prevent complaints from going viral. CX teams existed to contain damage, not create value.

That framing is collapsing — and the retailers leading the shift aren’t just running their support operations more efficiently. They’re redefining the function of CX. At Gladly Connect Live this May in Atlanta, leaders from Pact, MaryRuth’s and Ollie will share how they rebuilt CX into a revenue-generating function.

The numbers are striking, but the more interesting story is the thinking that got them there. Pact turned its website chat into a marketing channel Sustainable clothing brand Pact makes it easy to get dressed in a way that’s better for the planet with its organic cotton basics that are GOTS- and Fair Trade-certified, and carbon-neutral.

When Lauren Inman-Semerau joined the company as vp of customer experience, her first challenge was to rebuild Pact’s CX function from the ground up. She launched AI-powered chat in October 2025 — before Pact’s biggest sales months of the year. Through the holiday peak season, AI resolved 50% of customer conversations.

The resolution rate is now at 57%, a number Inman-Semerau attributes less to the platform than to how she set it up — specifically, the investment she made in answer quality before launch rather than after. Once that foundation was stable, she tested leveraging chat as a proactive marketing tool.

Now, Inman-Semerau meets weekly with the e-commerce team to review inventory and sales data. When a product generates a surge in returns, chat can go live on that product page and offer extra help with personalized size recommendations, styling suggestions and more — moving excess inventory before it hits the sale rack, without a discount.

Future-forward, her team will experiment with offering surprise-and-delight moments in the same way. During the holidays, the team piloted chat-initiated conversations on gift card pages — deployed strategically, not site-wide — to deliver targeted, memorable experiences without overwhelming the entire site.

The result: chat is converting at 17%, against a standard industry website conversion rate of 2%–5%. “AI-powered chat is a cross-functional role, not just support,” Inman-Semerau said. “You can hit multiple KPIs and goals when you’re building it out. You can take away those easy conversations, and you can start to hit sales goals.”

MaryRuth’s solved a fragmentation problem — and found a revenue channel MaryRuth’s is a fast-growing DTC wellness brand that sells vitamins, supplements and health products.

The brand had more than doubled its order volume since 2022, but its infrastructure hadn’t kept pace — the CX team was managing four disconnected platforms, each handling a different channel with none of them talking to each other. When a customer called after sending an email, agents had no way to see it.

When someone texted after leaving a voicemail, those were two separate conversations in two separate systems. Jim Rodden, chief people officer at MaryRuth’s, watched a strong team work harder than they should have had to.

“There were times where we were missing phone calls or missing chats because somebody was focused on email, and we couldn’t move them over quickly enough,” Rodden said. Consolidating onto a single platform eliminated the fragmentation. Separate conversations became one continuous thread. The 48-hour email backlog disappeared.

The CX team achieved a 35% efficiency gain within two months — eliminating time spent playing catch-up across disconnected systems. That efficiency created capacity for things that hadn’t been possible before: a QA program; an analytics function; and a brand training module built around how MaryRuth’s actually talks to customers.

The team also built WREN, an AI assistant, which launched on email with a 30% resolution rate in its first week. From there, the team developed a continuous improvement cycle, using internal QA, customer feedback and human evaluation to coach and refine WREN’s responses over time. The resolution rate climbed to 44. 5% overall.

Customers sometimes leave positive feedback for responses the human CX agent never wrote; they just approved what WREN had already drafted. The retention numbers followed.

The CX team now saves 20% of cancellation conversations and generates three times the cost-per-contact revenue — not by pushing customers to stay, but by diagnosing what went wrong and fixing it. “We’re not trying to save for save’s sake,” Rodden said. “We’re finding what’s wrong and then getting t