News Room

After more than a month of the national lockdown aimed at stemming the spread of COVID-19, plans for how the United States can move back toward normalcy have begun to emerge. The centerpiece of discussion has been the extent to which the country is able to massively ramp up accurate testing for the virus — a point of contention between the White House and leaders in the most heavily affected states since the outbreak’s earliest days.

Bottom Line: This year's hard reset is amplifying how vital customer relationships are and how much potential AI has to find new ways to improve them.

Because customers who shop online cannot try on their purchases, a third of all Internet sales get returned. But handling these returns is costly, giving retailers that have both physical stores and digital sales a clear advantage over retailers that operate only online. A new study examined the decisions around the pricing and return policies of a retailer with both stores and online sales to help explain why some firms opt to fully refund customers for their returns while others charge a fee for online returns. The findings offer guidance to retailers about pricing and policies on returns and refunds.

“My C-Level execs need to hear this!” Such was one shipper’s response I received after publishing a recent Two Minute Warning about how too many executives take their supply chains for granted. Candidly, I know that this is a challenging message for C-Level executives to hear, because over the years I’ve received several calls and had conversations with presidents and CEOs who have expressed concerns about the effectiveness of their supply chain.

Global supply chains have seen significant disruption from the spread of COVID-19. For crop protection, it has interrupted production along the entire crop input value chain — from raw materials to manufacturing to packaging to distribution to transportation.