Why retailers continue to lose money on what customers are tired of talking about

For a long time, the SAC was treated by retailers as a containment area, aimed at reducing queues, lowering the average service time and closing tickets. This logic helped to organize large-volume operations, but it also left a relevant loss hidden within the companies. Each call, message or chat carries signals about delayed delivery, product defect, website failure, stock problem, legal risk and sales opportunity. When retailers look at SAC only as a cost, they waste one of the richest sources of operational intelligence they already have.

This loss of intelligence becomes clearer when observing the advancement of public complaint platforms. Consumidor.gov.br, maintained by the National Consumer Secretariat, allows you to register demands, monitor company responses and consult indicators by segment, subject, problem complained of and supplier performance. According to the Ministry of Justice and Public Security, registered companies have up to ten days to respond to complaints, and the records help to map the main consumer conflicts in the country. The reading is clear: while many companies still treat SAC interactions as isolated operational records, part of this data is already being organized externally as a public indicator of quality, risk and reputation.

This movement should raise an alert in retail. A complaint about late delivery may reveal logistical failure in a specific region. A set of exchange contacts may indicate a recurring defect in a given batch. Repeated messages about payment difficulties may indicate a loss of conversion at checkout. Comments about confusing service may show that the company is poorly training its front line. The problem is that in many operations, this information remains trapped in recordings, loose transcripts, manual classifications, and reports that arrive too late to influence decisions. The SAC records the symptom, resolves part of the discomfort and rarely feeds the rest of the company with speed.

Service efficiency remains relevant in large volume operations, especially when it involves TMA, service level and cost control. The problem arises when these indicators start to represent the entire value of the SAC, as if a call closed quickly meant a well-resolved experience. Often, brief contact hides an unhappy customer, a lost sale or a recurring operational failure. It is at this point that conversational intelligence changes the role of the area, by allowing the integral analysis of interactions and the identification of feelings, behavior, intention and recurrence. According to ISG Provider Lens, AI-based tools help contact centers better understand consumer reactions and open up retention, cross-sell and upsell opportunities.

The competitive gain appears when the company stops treating the conversation as an operational record and starts treating it as strategic data. According to Forrester, insight-driven businesses grow, on average, by more than 30% per year, precisely because they incorporate data and analysis into product, service and operational decisions. The difference lies in the ability to transform volume into reading. In retail, this means understanding why a promotion generated complaints, which region has delivery problems, which products create more after-sales friction, which arguments improve conversion into transactional service and which legal risks appear before becoming formal notifications.

The SAC of the future will be less of a call closure center and more of a continuous business radar. Companies that are able to connect service, data and decisions will have a much more accurate view of what happens after the purchase, where the experience breaks down and how each failure impacts margin, reputation and recurrence. In retail, listening better is no longer a gesture of customer care and has become a management discipline. The company that learns from each interaction improves operations before the competition, corrects problems before the crisis and transforms service into intelligence to grow with more predictability

*Wanderly Limeira is Head of Products and Innovation responsible for the development of HVOICE, executive director of HVAR, with almost 30 years of experience with innovation companies and digital products.