How Buy.com trimmed customer support costs by $5 million a year

Buy.com reduced its customer service costs by more than $5 million over the past year with an outsourced solution including both automated and live help from Finali Corp, the company says.

Contributing to Buy.com’s savings was a 25% reduction in the number of full-time agents required to staff Buy’s call center. The percentage of customer inquiries resolved on first contact increased to 80%, while the cost of customer support dropped to 0.64% from 2.06% of Buy.com’s revenue.

In addition, Finali’s netSage Virtual Agent, which is deployed on Buy.com as a customer self-service option, has deflected nearly 40% of queries from customers to e-mail versus the phone. The netSage, which answers scriptable and repeatable support questions online, automatically escalates customer queries requiring longer or more complex answers to live help from Finali who can engage the customer by phone or e-mail.

“By outsourcing customer service operations with Finali, we realized significant improvement in our bottom-line costs,” says Brent Rusick, COO at Buy.com. “After our first year of service with Finali, we continue to enjoy further reductions in support costs and improvements in customer service overall.”