Outsourcing e-commerce functions helps CompactAppliance improve conversions
By replacing an in-house site search and other e-commerce features with outsourced services, CompactAppliance.com has gained more flexiblity to concentrate on merchandising and improve conversion rates and customer service, senior vice president Jason Roussos tells Internet Retailer.
CompactAppliance sells refrigerators, air-conditioners and other appliances designed for tight spaces like offices and apartments. It chose Atomz, a provider of site search and other hosted services, to replace an in-house site search function that offered basic search without an easy way to modify results or integrate with cross-selling and marketing efforts.
“Now we can go in and assign different relevancy to particular products in search results to promote certain products and brands,” Roussos says. “We’re getting better conversion rates.”
By outsourcing its inbound e-mail and live chat technology to InstantService.com, CompactAppliance can use its partner’s servers to run reports on its customer service agents’ activities. “We can see who’s doing more live chat sessions, and we can check the grammar of text of e-mail messages,” he says. “If we set a policy that all customer e-mail must be replied to within an hour, we can run reports to show if agents are meeting that.”
To build such a system in-house, he adds, would have been too costly in terms of both money and time. “We have our own internal e-mail system on Microsoft Exchange, but to install software like InstantService, do it well and maintain it, would take a lot of time and IT resources,” Roussos says.
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