At contact centers, the holiday crush is already starting
Retailers seem to push the Christmas shopping season farther out every year, and at contact centers, the season already has started, contact center Alpine Access founder and chief architect Jim Ball tells InternetRetailer.com.
“For our clients that have a seasonal peak, we are already seeing it,” says Ball, who estimates that 30% to 40% of Alpine’s business is retailers. Though for some clients, a back-to-school element also is a factor in increased call center activity, a bigger driver is the response to seasonal catalog drops that start as early as early September. In fact, Ball recalls one retailer client whose business results were severely affected in 2001 by the fact it had chosen September 11 as the day its first major catalog was to hit homes.
With holiday shopping already in play, retailer and outsource contact centers should have any new systems, technology and processes locked in by now, he says. One of the few areas where major investments at this point in the season still can make a difference is in adding needed telecommunications bandwidth, he notes.
“If you have existing infrastructure and trained agents and you have some history over the years and know what your volume is going to be, but you are trying something new like a larger catalog drop or a new channel like the Internet, you still have time to make sure you have enough actual bandwidth. You can still get T1 lines ordered in; that’s usually about a six-week lead time,” he says.
While seasonal marketing efforts are driving increased activity in the retail segment of Alpine’s business, demand for Internet-based channels such as e-mail and live chat is leveling off, Ball says. “There is definitely a user group that likes live chat, but we are not seeing the demand for it that people thought we would several years ago,” he says. “On the e-mail front, we don’t see a lot of demand because it’s work that lends itself fairly well to going overseas,” he adds, noting that to the extent some e-mail communication from retailers and others is pre-formatted, it can be done overseas at lower cost and that text communication eliminates any issues regarding ex-U.S. accents.
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