Drilling into retail, Newstore’s secret shopper research into 250 top brands found capabilities have increased dramatically in the past year: for example, 53% now offer buy online pick-up in-store (BORIS) options, up from 25% two years ago. In-store experience may have suffered as investments shift elsewhere: just 48% give mobile devices to in-store staff, down from 68% two years ago.
Happy New Year, Dear Reader. The News Gods are still out but we always have surveys. This one from Dynamic Yield assesses personalization maturity across eight dimensions and three geographic regions. Technology lags culture and leadership but there’s progress: 31% say they can now personalize most digital interactions, up from just 10% the year before.
Kustomer found the most desired retail personalization features were quick access to recently viewed products (59%) and online account information and purchase history (55%). But take note: ability to opt out of personalization (52%) ranked far ahead of personalized product selections based on past browsing and buying behavior (32%), behavior on other retail websites (19%), or demographic information (12%).
If you still think that MCP stands for Male Chauvinist Pig, well, the 1970’s want their disco ball back. Today’s hep cats know that MCP stands for Model Context Protocol, a new-but-widely supported standard that lets large language models access structured data as context for their prompts. Early adopters include Salesforce and Adobe, and search platform Algolia is now using it to feed their data to customer-facing real-time AI agents.