Whether outsourcing customer service or doing it in house, retailers must manage complexity and responsiveness to give shoppers the help they seek.
As more consumers shop online they expect e-retailers to provide the same level of personalized, proactive customer service they could receive in a store. For small and mid-sized retailers that do not have the financial resources and personnel to invest in customer service that their larger counterparts have, those expectations can be a heavy burden.
“Consumers expect customer service representatives to be knowledgeable about the retailer’s brand and available to them when they want,” says Herman Shooster, chairman of Global Response, a call center outsourcing firm. “The technology and tools are available for retailers to make the customer service experience as informative, productive and pleasant as possible for the shopper regardless of their size.”
Applications such as live chat and CRM, FAQ pages, and e-mail are some of the most common tools that retailers use to meet consumers’ heightened expectations for customer service and stretch their own budgets.
Lots of options
“Retailers need tools like CRM and live chat to match the quality of their service with the service expectation of the customer,” says Greg Fettes, president and CEO of contact center provider 24-7 INtouch. “The good thing is that retailers have a lot of options for stretching their customer service budget and avoiding the cost of fronting the money to build the infrastructure to support them.”
Determining which options are best and whether to implement them in-house or outsource comes down to figuring the cost of the interaction with the customer versus the cost of making the sale.
“There is a balance between cost of service and customer satisfaction,” says Kelly O’Neill, product marketing director for ATG, which offers web-based customer service applications as part of its e-commerce solution.
Determining that balance starts with identifying the types of shoppers that frequent the retailer’s site, which service tools they use and whether they require more high-touch service or prefer self-service methods, such as FAQ pages.
“Knowing the customer’s behavior and preferences is the starting point for building any customer service unit,” says O’Neill. “If the customer is anonymous, such as a first-time visitor to the site, retailers can still identify methods to service the shoppers, such as offering live chat or directing them to self-service pages by watching the actions that lead to the service request and the pages browsed on the site.”
Don’t forget the phone number
While shoppers’ actions may indicate whether they can be helped in a self-service environment, one of the most common mistakes retailers make when creating a self-service environment is to neglect posting click-to-call, live chat buttons, or an 800 number on the information pages.
“Even though the shopper can be helped in a self-service environment, there are shoppers within this segment that may feel the need to have contact with a service agent if they don’t get all the answers they are looking for,” Fettes says. “Self-service tools are great, but they are there to service the customer not just save money, so the option to contact a service agent needs to be available at any time in the servicing process.”
Failing to provide the option to contact a service agent on an FAQ page can not only cost the retailer a sale, but also diminish the quality of the brand. “No customer should feel abandoned in a self-service environment,” says Wendy Shooster, co-CEO at Global Response. “Online or in a store, when a shopper can’t find anyone to help, it makes them wonder if the retailer values them as a customer.”
Proactively feeding live chat and click-to-call buttons or pushing a short survey to gather more information from customers using the self-service environment are other ways to guide shoppers to the best content and enhance FAQs and other information pages. The triggers for making these service tools available are powered by rules-based engines that are programmed to take a specific action based on a shopper’s behavior, such as viewing a page for a predetermined time or constantly toggling back and forth between certain product and information pages, according to O’Neill.
Dismantling silos
“Retailers don’t want to have self-service tools operating in a siloed environment because that makes them less effective,” says O’Neill. “Self-service tools need to be surrounded with as wide a variety of service options to be as effective as possible.”
Implementing a wide variety of customer service applications to put around service tools can be expensive. The technology alone needed to operate a 50- to 60-seat contact center can cost retailers $400,000, according the Fettes. Space to house the contact center, personnel to staff it and all other related costs are extra.
One option to reduce the cost of building a contact center is to outsource the center, as the cost of agents, technology and agent training are spread out over a large customer base.
“When retailers compare the cost of outsourcing to hiring the customer service agents to provide 24-7 service coverage alone, outsourcing makes a lot more sense,” says Fettes.
24-7 INtouch provides such services as live chat, e-mail response, 24-hour help desk, IVR systems, web-based customer care, and order-taking services.
Other benefits outsourcing firms provide include creating call center redundancy in the event a natural disaster knocks out the primary call center. “Few retailers have the resources to provide that kind of back-up,” Herman Shooster says.
Global Response provides live chat, interactive voice response, data and document processing, in addition to call center services. Clients include Crate & Barrel, Lord & Taylor, FAO Schwarz and National Geographic.
Economics aside, however, before retailers make the decision to outsource they must ask whether customer service is a core part of their business. It is important that retailers consider this question carefully because failing to do so can cause them to stretch their expertise too thin, according to Fettes.
“Managing inbound customer service inquiries and live chat applications are not necessarily core to a retailer’s business,” Fettes says. “The benefit of outsourcing is that it allows retailers to focus on marketing, merchandising and product selection, which are core functions that ought to be managed in-house.”
Still, some retailers prefer to operate contact center technology in-house, and for them economical options do exist. ATG develops applications for retailers including licensed e-commerce software or on-demand e-commerce, end-to-end web hosted services.
The ATG Commerce Service Center, for example, is a web-based service that allows agents to see paths shoppers have taken through the site, what products are in their shopping carts and whether a shopper has a history of cart abandonment. This level of information helps the agent see the problem the shopper is having more clearly, enabling the agent to quickly access the information desired by the shopper, guide the shopper to the right page in the web store and even make suggestions that reduce the risk of cart abandonment, such as making the shopper aware of a relevant promotion she may have overlooked.
The application can also be programmed to direct shoppers to the agent with the appropriate product knowledge or skills based on products in the shopping cart or pages the shopper has viewed prior to initiating the service request.
“Good service platforms are capable of narrowing down the needs of the shopper and engaging them in the proper manner,” O’Neill says. “If a shopper is viewing pages with a lot of technical information or a complex product, it is important to be able to automatically route them to the appropriate service agent in a seamless fashion.”
Don’t believe the myth
One of the common myths about outsourcing is that once a retailer turns over customer service to a third party, they can simply forget about managing it. Nothing could be further from the truth, according to Wendy Shooster.
“Retailers need to constantly collaborate with their outsourcing partner to make sure the highest possible standards of service are maintained,” Shooster says. “We see our job as both protecting and promoting the brands we represent. To do that right requires that we stay in constant touch with our client partners. It is not an either/or situation—our people and the client’s are what make it work.”
What retailers need to discuss with outsourcing partners are the strategies for deploying service technologies and methods to ensure quality control at least once a week. In some cases, such as during peak shopping periods, communications may need to take place daily, according to 24-7 INtouch’s Fettes.
“It is important that retailers and their outsourcing partner discuss such issues as agent performance, the effectiveness of the service tools being used and whether the goals for customer satisfaction are meeting the expectations of the customer,” Fettes says. “The discussion can’t be one-sided. The highest levels of customer satisfaction come when the retailer and the outsourcing partner proactively communicate about how to manage, evaluate and enhance customer service.”
Quality assurance starts with making certain the outsourcing vendor understands the retailer’s product, brand and culture. Understanding the culture is particularly essential to providing high-quality customer service. Global Response sends a team of senior managers and project managers to each retail client’s headquarters to absorb the brand culture. When they return they recreate that culture in the call center. Customer service agents at Global Response are even called “Brand Care Specialists” to reinforce their core obligation to protect and promote the brand.
A brand culture
“Retailers ask us all the time how we plan to recreate their brand and service culture,” says Wendy Shooster. “We do it by creating our own brand care culture in which the most fundamental value is caring for our clients’ brands.”
Retailers are encouraged to spend time onsite at Global Response to participate in the process of recreating their brand culture. “Lord & Taylor sends its own team to help train and maintain their unique culture,” Shooster says. “Many of our clients spend time with us on site and we make sure they feel comfortable doing so.”
Having a user-friendly evaluation system makes it easier for retailers to access agent performance metrics. At Global Response retailers can remotely monitor customer interaction in real time. They can also review digital recordings of those interactions, adds Shooster.
While hands-on training is important to ensuring high-quality customer service, retailers can also take advantage of many of the applications that help automate agent training. ATG Commerce Service Center can be programmed to automatically prompt the creation of personalized training schedules for agents based on results from evaluations.
Agent evaluations can be performed by pushing surveys to shoppers after they have finished interacting with a service agent. Questions and tracking codes can be included to link the results back to a group of agents working a specific shift or a specific agent. Agent performance can also be tracked using such variables as cart abandonment or successful cross-sell and upsells when interacting with a customer.
If an agent does not score well on product knowledge or has not received a refresher course for a few months, the platform can be programmed to flag this data and automatically prompt training sessions and send a notice of the training session directly to the agent.
“The more automation that can be brought to training and agent evaluation, the more efficient, personal, and user-friendly initiating these processes become,” says O’Neill.
The right level of automation
Online training sessions can also bring greater efficiency to educating service representatives about the latest changes in pricing, new products and promotions. 24-7 INtouch blocks out time during each agent’s shift as needed so agents can train on these types of information updates at their desks. Once the session is complete, all the pertinent changes are automatically uploaded to the workstation.
“With the right level of automation, agents can get up to speed on information updates to the catalog and real-time changes to promotions in between service calls,” Fettes says.
Having a user-friendly evaluation system also makes it easier for retailers to access agent performance metrics. Global Response enables retailers to remotely monitor in real-time each customer interaction or review digital recordings of those sessions at a later date. Recordings are archived as long as the client desires.
Finally, retailers want an outsourcing partner who understands just how valuable their brand name is to them; a partner who understands that a good brand has an aura about it that has taken a great deal of time and resources to create.
Says Wendy Shooster: “When a retailer finds the right outsourcing partner, one who can demonstrate the policies and tools and especially the culture that supports their brand they have found that sweet spot where client, customer and outsourcing partner are all happy.”
As online shoppers’ expectations about customer service rise, retailers will need to find more ways to automate service to meet customer expectations.
“The convergence between technology, service levels, agent performance, and customer satisfaction is only going to increase,” says Fettes. “Not investing in the technology to keep pace with this trend will be a mistake.”
