What Taylor Swift's Eras Tour can teach retailers about AI and CX

Taylor Swift dropped her final Eras Tour concert film. Today's release on Disney+ marks the end of the most commercially successful tour in music history. But for anyone paying attention to customer experience, it also offers a masterclass in something most brands are still struggling to achieve.

Personalization and customer devotion at scale.

Every fan felt like the only fan

The Eras Tour wasn't just a concert. It was 149 shows across five continents, 10.2 million tickets sold, and an estimated $2.2 billion in revenue. Those numbers alone would make it historic. What made it a unicorn of a case study was how individual it felt to every single person in the crowd.

Swift didn't just remember every era of her career. She made fans feel remembered. Everything from friendship bracelets to surprise songs chosen for specific cities. The way she acknowledged long-time fans and first-timers differently. The emotional callbacks that rewarded people who had followed her journey from the beginning.

In her trailer announcement, Swift thanked fans for "being a part of the most thrilling chapter of my entire life." That language matters. Not "attending" or "watching." Being a part of. Fans weren't an audience. They were participants in something that recognized them.

This is exactly what most customer service experiences fail to deliver. And it's exactly what AI-powered CX platforms are finally making possible for retailers.

The "not being known" problem in retail customer service

On the flip side, retailers need to be aware of these concerning stats. 59% of consumers will walk away from a brand they love after several bad experiences. And 17% will leave after just one.

What makes an experience bad enough to break loyalty? Usually, it's the feeling of not being known.

Having to repeat your name. Spelling your email again. Explaining your order history to someone who has no context. Being treated like a ticket number instead of a person with a relationship to the brand.

Melissa MacAlister, Head of Customer Success at Gladly, put it simply in a recent Modern Retail feature. "This sense of not being known, having to repeat oneself, having to give an order number, and having to spell one's name yet again — that comes up in nine out of 10 customer service complaints."

Nine out of 10. That's not a minor friction point. That's the dominant pain in customer experience today.

AI customer experience changes the math

The old approach to customer service treated every interaction as a separate event. A ticket. A case. Something to be resolved and closed. This made personalization nearly impossible at scale because every conversation started from zero.

Modern AI CX platforms like Gladly work differently. They aggregate every customer interaction across every channel into a single lifelong conversation. When a customer reaches out, the AI already knows who they are, what they've purchased, how they prefer to communicate, and what issues they've had before.

This isn't about automation for its own sake. It's about giving customers what Swift gave her fans. The feeling of being recognized.

The results speak for themselves. Retailers using Gladly have seen AI-assisted conversations lead to purchases 20% of the time, customer satisfaction scores reaching 98%, and handle times dropping by 45%. Support teams are quite literally transforming from cost centers into revenue drivers.

Outdoor brand KUHL saw a 120% increase in revenue per call after implementing Gladly's platform. Their AI now handles 59% of email inquiries and 27% of chat conversations, freeing human agents to focus on high-value interactions where empathy and creativity matter most.

What "main character energy" looks like in customer service

There's a reason "main character energy" became such a cultural phrase. People want to feel like the protagonist of their own story. Not a background extra. Not a number in a queue.

The Eras Tour understood this instinctively. Every element was designed to make fans feel central to the experience, even in a stadium with 70,000 other people.

The same principle applies to customer experience strategy. When your AI platform has context about who the customer is, it can treat every interaction as a continuation of a relationship rather than a cold start. It can recommend products based on actual purchase history. It can anticipate needs. It can resolve issues without making customers prove who they are first.

This is what personalization in retail actually means. Not just using someone's first name in an email. Knowing enough about them to make every touchpoint feel relevant.

The future of conversational commerce

MacAlister predicts that AI in CX will become increasingly channel-independent. Right now, if a customer starts a conversation with a chatbot on a website, they usually can't take that conversation with them. The context disappears the moment they switch to text or phone.

That's changing. The next generation of customer experience AI will let people pick up conversations wherever they are, on whatever device they're using, without losing history or starting over.

She also expects static FAQ pages to evolve into conversational, brand-owned experiences. "Brands are going to want to own more of those conversations," MacAlister noted. "Similar to what happened with shopping, merchants will want to incentivize customers to come directly to them for service because they can own that relationship."

This shift from reactive support to proactive relationship-building is where customer loyalty gets built. Or lost.

What retailers can learn from the most successful tour in history

Taylor Swift didn't become a billionaire by treating fans as transactions. She built a relationship model at scale. One where every interaction reinforced the connection rather than eroding it.

Retailers face the same choice. You can treat customer service as a cost to be minimized. Or you can treat it as the primary relationship-building opportunity with people who have already chosen to spend money with you.

The technology to deliver personalization at scale finally exists. AI customer experience platforms can now do what was impossible just a few years ago. They can remember. They can connect context across channels. They can handle the repetitive work so human agents can focus on the moments that matter.

The question isn't whether this technology is ready. It's whether your brand is ready to stop treating customers like tickets and start treating them like people.

Because your customers aren't looking for another FAQ page. They're looking for main character energy.

And they'll remember who gave it to them.

Want to see how leading retailers are using AI to transform customer experience into a revenue driver? Learn how Gladly is redefining AI in CX for retailers.