Hello OmniTalk Fans!
If you have ever worked a Saturday shift on a retail sales floor, you already know the feeling. It is busy, something has gone sideways, your supervisor is nowhere to be found, and your radio is asking you to repeat yourself for the third time. I have been there. And in this conversation, I finally found someone who not only gets it but is actually doing something about it. Oh, and as a bonus, the AI agent at the center of it all shares a name with Omni Talk’s own beloved producer Ella.
I sat down with Soroosh Seyhoon, Chief Revenue Officer at Zello, for a special edition of the Retail Technology Spotlight Series focused on how voice intelligence can change the way retailers understand and manage store operations. Our conversation covered why frontline voice data is the most under leveraged asset in retail today, how an AI agent in an associate’s ear can compress weeks of onboarding into days, and what it actually takes to roll this kind of technology out across hundreds of stores without it turning into a nightmare.
Here are my biggest takeaways from the conversation:
The Store Floor Is Running on Hearsay
The core problem with retail store operations today is not a lack of effort. It is a lack of real feedback loops. What actually happens on the floor travels up the chain as stories and secondhand accounts, with the loudest voice usually winning the narrative whether or not it reflects reality. Soroosh described it simply: you hear what happened through conversations reporting up the chain, but you do not have the live data to turn the hearsay into actually hearing what was said. The fix is not more meetings or better reporting templates. It is capturing the voice layer that the front line already operates on and turning it into a system of record.
Retailers Have Spent a Decade Watching the Store Instead of Listening to It
Nearly every technology transformation in retail over the last decade has been built for headquarters to watch what is happening in the store, not for the store to talk back. Retailers are exceptionally good at measuring sales and transaction speed. What they cannot measure today is the quality of the associate interaction that produced those numbers, or failed to. As I told Soroosh during our conversation, it has always been a black hole. Voice intelligence finally gives retailers a sensor on the input side of the equation, with the associate becoming the data point rather than just the subject of observation.
An AI Agent in the Ear Changes Everything for New Associates
Turnover is not slowing down and training is not getting easier, which means retailers are constantly asking new people to perform at the level of seasoned veterans with a fraction of the preparation. Zello’s answer is Ella, an AI agent that lives in the associate’s earpiece and answers questions in real time just like a supervisor would, without pulling that supervisor away from whatever else they are managing. The result is faster ramp times and associates who feel confident from day one rather than anxious and undertrained.
The Examples From the Field Are Eye Opening
Soroosh walked me through several real cases that show just how much slips through the cracks today. A retailer kept getting price check requests on the same plant over and over. The voice data surfaced the pattern, someone investigated, and it turned out the price label was placed exactly where the plant got watered every day. A broken glass bird feeder left on a returns counter led to an associate cutting her hand, and it was never formally reported anywhere except in the voices of her coworkers asking for help. A cashier help button that a retailer had invested heavily in deploying had been broken for months, with associates quietly reverting to old habits and nobody flagging it until the voice data made it obvious. These are not edge cases. This is just Tuesday in most stores.
Digitize First, Then Unlock the Intelligence
When I asked Soroosh where retailers should start, he did not hesitate. Stop using radios. Get frontline communication onto a single digital platform, whether that is a company-issued device or an associate’s personal phone running the Zello app. That alone creates immediate gains because conversations become channel-specific and replayable rather than broadcast noise that half the team misses. Once communication is digitized, the voice intelligence layer can be switched on and the real learning begins. His advice was to start in a handful of stores, find the people who are eager to test, and let the data tell you what is unique to your operation before trying to scale anything.
The Future Is Push to Connect
Soroosh described a future where the platform evolves beyond push to talk into what he called push to connect, where every form of human connection flows through a single operational layer. Internal team communication, external customer calls, multimedia sharing, proactive AI coaching, all of it feeding a data picture that retail has never had access to before. He compared it to the way Zoom meetings get recorded and summarized now. The front line deserves the same thing. And honestly, he is right.
You can listen to or watch my full conversation with Soroosh Seyhoon wherever you get your podcasts.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Soundcloud | Amazon Music | YouTube
Be careful out there,
Chris and the Omni Talk Team
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Omni Talk® is the retail blog for retailers, written by retailers. Chris Walton founded Omni Talk® in 2017 and have quickly turned it into one of the fastest growing blogs in retail.