E-commerce has grown over the past few years. Sadly, with this growth, the focus has moved from giving the best service to getting new customers.
So many businesses do not have a great customer service structure. This often means they have more unsatisfied clients. According to Zendesk, 61% of your clients will move to a competitor after one bad experience.
In this guide, we will stress the role of good customer service in e-commerce. We will also look at how we can improve customer service using contact center software.
Customer Service in E-commerce
Today, many people have buying options online. There are over 12 million e-commerce sites online and probably hundreds of thousands of direct competitors in your niche. This means that if you lose a client to poor customer service, you probably won’t get them back.
Customer service is the primary way customers decide if a business is worth sticking with. If a customer buys from you and doesn't like the experience, they'll never return. On the flip side, if your customers enjoyed the experience, they’ll often return with more customers.
Good customer service also means more money for you. For example, studies show that it costs at least 5x more to get a new customer than to keep an old one. So if you can keep most of your customers, you save more.
Your customer service is more than how you treat people when they speak to you. It is how you present your business. Customers will enjoy their experience and trust you more if you present yourself as a pro. Presting yourself as a professional means using good software to handle an essential part of customer service – your contact center.
Contact Centre Software and E-commerce
What is a Contact Centre Software?
Contact center software helps companies handle contacts from clients. When a company has many clients, it will have many daily callers. People will call to ask about an item or to find a solution to a problem they face.
But contact centers are more than calls. They also handle other channels, like live chat, video messages, emails, etc. So you can connect with your clients using all these channels with contact centers.
Many people mistake contact center software for call center software. A call center uses the phone as the only channel to receive customer calls, while contact centers use multiple channels, including the phone to reach out to and connect with the customer.
There are many types of contact center software.
- Inbound Contact Center Software
This kind is focused on receiving calls, emails, etc., from customers.
- Outbound Contact Center Software
This type helps with company outreach. For example, if a company wants to reach out to its clients to market new products. Companies can also use this software to check their customers' satisfaction.
- Cloud Contact Center Software
This type is hosted on the internet for all inbound and outbound communications.
Now, let us look at some of the features and benefits of contact center software solutions.
Features and Benefits of Contact Center Software
Contact Centers have some features that make them easy to use for the required purpose. We will go through some of their features, along with the benefits these features offer:
Multichannel and Omnichannel Integration
As we said earlier, contact centers connect clients with businesses across different mediums. This means that customers can use social media, email, or live chat to reach the company.
Contact center software has tools that ensure all these channels are in one place. This way, if a customer uses email, a customer service representative can see it on time. Then the representative can reply quickly using the same channel.
This integration is often referred to as multichannel and omnichannel integration.
With all the channels in one place, customer service representatives don't have to bounce around a lot. Instead, they can see messages from different channels in real-time and reply as needed.
With omnichannel integration, customer service agents can seamlessly continue discussions with customers across different channels. A customer who started an inquiry on a website live chat may decide to complete the process with a phone call.
Omnichannel integration ensures the agent is up to speed with the situation and helps provide context to solve the customer’s issue.
Call Routing
Your customer service unit may be divided into departments to handle customer service issues. For example, you could have a department that deals with subscription-related issues, another that deals with payment, etc.
Call routing ensures that customers are directed to an agent in the department related to their issue when they call. This way, customers don’t have to wait for long and will have a smoother customer experience. Call routing works best when integrated with an Interactive Voice Response tool.
Agent Management
You want to manage your agents easily if you have an extensive contact center system. In addition, you want to be sure they are saying the right things and helping the customers as much as possible.
Contact center software provides different tools to manage your agent's performance. For example, a digital recording tool can record conversations between agents and customers. You can also have tools that allow customers to rate agents' performance.
Analytics
Analytics helps you check different data points and see where to improve. For example, you can see what customers complain about, how often customers get dissatisfied, etc. . These analytics helps you build a better customer service system.
Intuitive Dashboards
Contact center software should have dashboards that are easy to use. An intuitive dashboard shows analytics and makes it easy for supervisors to monitor. This makes it easy to optimize the entire system.
For example, supervisors can see which agents are getting low customer reviews and communicate with them through the software. They can also get notifications from agents when they have high-level problems they need solutions to.
A good dashboard helps for seamless communication between agents so that a customer’s issue is dealt with quickly.
Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
This is a common feature in call center software. However, with interactive voice response, your customers don't have to wait on the phone for long.
When your customers call, the IVR tool gives them an automated response with instructions. Sometimes, the information in the IVR is sufficient to handle the customer’s challenges, and they don’t need to reach a customer service representative. Other times, the IVR routes the call to the department where the customer can get help as quickly as possible.
Conclusion
Although forgotten, customer service plays a vital role in building a business. Customers will often return when a business has an efficient customer service team. This means more sales and more money for the business.
To build an efficient customer service team, you need some help. Contact center software helps businesses optimize their customer service processes. As a result, agents can work better, supervisors can monitor easily, and customers leave each call satisfied.
Even better, contact center software is multichannel. This means that they allow customers and agents to interact on multiple channels. These and many other features make contact center software an excellent option for building your customer service system.
