E-commerce call center solutions.

E-commerce call centers face a unique set of challenges different from traditional call centers. Customers are often dealing with products or services they haven’t used before and require more in-depth support than average. With the rise of online shopping, customers also expect immediate assistance when they need it, making e-commerce call centers essential to creating a positive customer experience and increasing customer loyalty.

Unique challenges need to be addressed with unique solutions. While some may dismiss call centers as outdated, expensive, and inefficient - that couldn’t be farther from the truth. With a comprehensive suite of products, these solutions can help you maximize your customer experience, reduce costs, and ensure seamless operations. Here, we’ll take a look at why call centers are an absolute necessity, why some people might dismiss them, and, most importantly, how to set up a brilliant e-commerce call center operation from implementing an Omnichannel approach to making use of Automated Translation. Now, let’s get to the center of the issue.

Why e-commerce call centers are important.

They are an essential customer service tool that allows businesses to quickly and efficiently interact with customers, as well as handle any inquiries or issues that may arise. Call centers also provide customer feedback which can be used to help make decisions about product offerings or services offered.

With such an important role in the customer experience, it's essential for businesses to have a reliable and effective call center solution. E-commerce call centers are an ideal solution for companies selling online products and services, as they provide a reliable platform to quickly handle inquiries or offer quick responses. They can be integrated with various systems such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management), payment gateways, order management systems, and more. This allows the business to access customer information in an efficient manner and provides an easy way to manage customer interactions.

E-commerce call centers also offer a variety of features that make it easier for customers to interact with your business. These include automated systems that can answer simple questions, provide personalized greetings, and even direct customers to the right support person depending on the type of issue. They also offer multiple language support, allowing customers to communicate in their own language if needed. 

Of course, they are also immensely important so that you can sort our customer complaints quickly and efficiently. There’s nothing more likely to ruin your relationship with customers than bad customer service. On the other hand, if you have easy-to-navigate, efficient customer service that is built on the right mindset, can also be a great boon and further improve your relationship with customers and their brand loyalty. 

Why aren’t they the obvious choice?

Businesses lately tend to view call centers as necessary evils. Meaning that they have them just because it is expected of them. Call centers are seen as a waste of money that doesn’t provide results and if a customer has to call customer care that it is definitely a bad thing. 

This attitude is present because they do require money to set up and be operational. You need to have agents that need equipment and a space to work in. The agents need to be trained and paid. The equipment needs to be bought and maintained. The space needs to be paid for every month and maintained and cleaned. On top of all that, the customer care industry has one of the highest attrition rates, meaning that agents need to be hired and trained almost constantly.

The next issue is that agents are seen as completing menial tasks throughout the day without really helping customers until a certain time of the year. Those peak periods provide an additional challenge, be it holidays in retail or the summer in travel, you can expect a large influx of calls. This doesn’t mean that your product or service is bad, just that more people are using your business which means more chances for something to go wrong. That, in turn, overworks the agents leading, once again, to that high attrition rate. 

All of these things are true for your typical e-commerce call center, but, of course, with experience there come ways to go around, mitigate or even turn these problems in your favor. Let’s see how we do it. 

How does Transcom handle it?

Our decades of experience as a BPO mean that we have a pretty good understanding of what it takes to create an exceptional e-commerce customer service operation. From offering our employees the chance to be the best that they can, to empowering them with cutting-edge tech.

We believe that great e-commerce customer service is the key to a successful business and have helped many brilliant clients achieve their CX goals. How exactly do we do it? 

Analytics and AI advisory services.

You won't get far by just rushing blindly into establishing a call center operation. It's more than just people answering phones. The first thing needed to create an excellent e-commerce call center is to analyze the data available and form any and all decisions based on that data.

 To help with that we can analyze your existing operation using our AI advisory services. This way we can know what areas need improvement, what areas need complete restructuring, what areas don't need changes, and what areas could be changed but won't make a noticeable difference. 

After that has been done, the role of data is not over and it does not diminish. On the contrary, data and analytics become more important than ever. We have the ability to analyze performance and sentiment to know how to best improve your agents and where they may be potentially lacking. The analysis voice and text can provide into invaluable insight into the even most detailed aspects like word, tone, and character. This way it’s easy to pinpoint exactly what may be wrong.

Also, you can do a lot with supporting your employees through our performance and engagement apps like T:Perform. By making sure all your employees are as motivated and happy as can be, you are also ensuring that they function at the highest level they can. 

Near and offshoring. 

Nearshoring and offshoring are both excellent strategies for creating a successful e-commerce call center. By nearshoring, businesses can access qualified personnel who are located in close proximity to their home base. This allows them to easily maintain control of operations while reducing costs associated with relocating staff or setting up additional infrastructure. In addition to the cost savings, nearshoring also improves customer service. The shorter distances between the call center and customers mean that CSAT will not be affected by cultural factors.

Offshoring can provide similar cost savings as nearshoring while allowing for access to highly-skilled personnel located in more cost-competitive countries. Additionally, businesses can benefit from cultural insights that may not be available in their home countries. Offshoring can also provide a more cost-effective way to scale operations quickly, and it allows businesses to access new markets with customer service centers located in those regions. 

Transcom has been implementing off and nearshoring solutions with great success with many of our clients. Not only do we provide our clients with highly competent agents but we also do it while cutting the cost of operation. Apart from that, we also understand the importance of the safety of the data of your customers. That's why we take every measure possible to ensure that the transition is smooth and secure. 

Accelerated Development Assistant.

The issue that one might have with off or nearshoring their operation is that it means that there are more agents to be trained which takes time and effort. Luckily, we've thought of that too. 

One of our proprietary tools is ADA, our AI-powered agent development accelerator. While training, potential agents go through a "roleplay" phase in which they practice conversations with future customers. These interactions, while definitely useful, lack the unpredictability and genuineness of real-life interactions. To give agents the best possible learning experience we have developed a tool that can have actual conversations with agents using a specific persona that you can set. 

This creates genuine conversations with different types of "people" which helps better prepare agents for what they will encounter when they start working. After the conversation, we can also analyze what the agent said and did to find precise pain points in their work. This type of AI-supported exercise not only helps reduce training times but also reduces the main problem in customer service which is attrition. The high turnover rate caused by the nature of the work is one of the biggest issues to be solved. The problem is the fact that you have to keep training new agents and produce an inexperienced floor while also bleeding money. But, by setting realistic expectations and giving potential agents a taste of what’s to come they are less likely to give up after training when faced with real customers. 

Our tool can be set to any specific tone of voice, the ultimate goal of the call, resistance to sales, etc. that you want. That means that you can give your potential agents very specific examples of customers and give them as wide a variety as possible, ensuring that they start working truly as prepared as possible. 

Omnichannel solutions.

Another way to set up an amazing e-commerce call center is to allow your customers to reach out through a channel that is most convenient to them. That means that if they prefer instant messaging over calling you should have that channel. Do they prefer reaching out via social media? You should have that too.

You might be saying to yourself: “But that’s just multichannel.” In a sense you’re right. With multichannel it shares the idea of having as many channels as possible so that the customer has the freedom to choose whatever they feel most comfortable with. That is where the similarities end. With a multichannel approach, it is as if you have an x number of single-channel approaches that don’t really work together and provide no benefit apart from choice.

The main benefit of Omnichannel is extremely effective oversight of interactions. Here an agent can, at a glance, see and understand why and when the customer called and who they talked to. This saves time for both the agent and customer, also the customer doesn’t have to go through the hassle of repeating all of the information they already said when making a follow-up call.

Making the agent’s job easier and the customer’s experience more pleasant are the two main goals of Omnichannel. It leads to a faster resolution of any and all queries, raises CSAT, reduces AHT, and frees up time for the agent making them more productive than ever. 

Automation.

Automation is one of the most important aspects to consider when setting up a call center for an e-commerce business. Automation helps businesses maintain better customer service and route calls quickly and accurately. This leads to improved customer satisfaction, as well as faster resolution times and higher efficiency.

Call routing can be extremely helpful in managing incoming calls efficiently. Automated call routing can assign the right representative to the customer based on their needs, while also ensuring that no customer is left waiting too long or transferred unnecessarily. The system can also be used to prioritize calls by assigning appropriate agents to certain types of customers and allow for easy tracking of customer service metrics.

Another benefit of automation in an e-commerce call center is the ability to respond quickly and accurately to customer requests. Automated systems can provide customers with personalized information based on their needs as well as relevant product or service information. This helps ensure that the customer is provided with all of the necessary information in a timely manner, leading to an improved overall experience.

In addition, automated call centers can help reduce costs for businesses. Automated systems can help streamline operations, leading to fewer phone calls and improved customer service. This can result in lower staffing costs, reduced operational costs, and improved customer satisfaction levels. 

Automated Translation.

In order to further cut costs but still increase CSAT and agent satisfaction you can use our groundbreaking, AI-powered tool - Automated Translation. The focus was on creating a seamless near-instant translation tool that easily integrates with any platform you may use. 

And what do you know? We succeeded. Automated Translation does exactly what we want it to do and it does it great. Translating in over a hundred languages with almost perfect accuracy and doing it with a client-specific glossary so that the messages sent are always on brand.

A tool like this will allow you to expand and/or ramp up your service by hiring in more cost-competitive markets and having basically native language support anywhere in the world. The tool was also made with hand-off between agents in mind. This means that customers won’t even notice a change in agent if it has to occur. 

The results from clients using it are overwhelmingly positive with costs being down, agents being happier, and with a positive impact on CSAT. Meaning that you can’t go wrong with translation.

Chatbots and other bots.

These days chatbots have become ubiquitous in any online business. They can provide customers with fast, reliable assistance at all hours of the day and night. Not only that, but they also help deflect calls from the human agents in your e-commerce call center, freeing up their time for more complex customer service issues.

The goal of implementing a chatbot into an e-commerce call center operation is to answer questions before the call even happens. This way customers can have simple questions answered without having to contact customer support and using up time for the agent.

At the same time, the use of bots before connecting the customer to an agent can help deflect calls by also answering simple questions and can also help routing so that the customer can have their query answered ASAP.

Overall, chatbots are an ideal solution for e-commerce call centers due to their ability to provide customers with fast and reliable assistance while also helping reduce staffing costs. By leveraging the latest in artificial intelligence technology, they can help create a seamless customer experience that will keep customers coming back.