The DTC industry is arguably the fastest to mature in a short span, largely aided by some rapid developments in technology but also driven by shifts in customer expectations, shopping preferences, and generally improved impulsiveness of people.   

The Corona pandemic further encouraged stay-at-home shopping in 2020. Not only was it a safer method to shop, but with travel restrictions and restaurants staying shut down, “add to cart” became everybody’s go-to guilty pleasure. 44% of retail sales made post-pandemic have been online purchases. 

But with this boost, the competition has also increased significantly. It's challenging for small business owners to grow since they compete with big marketplaces like Amazon and Alibaba. Amazon accounts for 50% of online retail sales in the USA today. While they have pioneered the third-party market, they dominate the eCommerce industry due to their unparalleled customer support, which has helped them establish trust with their customers. They just keep coming back for more. 

Independent business owners need to match the expectations set by these giants for customer satisfaction. It is where good customer service comes into the picture. Most business owners rely on heavy automation to achieve this goal, but agent interactions continue to be more effective in building fellowship and customer loyalty. 

The pandemic has also induced this need for human interactions and pushed businesses to treat their customers with more empathy. An eCommerce contact center is one of the strongest mediums of customer services today. 

There’s no denying that eCommerce call center services are highly rewarding when it comes to creating brand loyalty. They allow you to humanize customer support and generate revenue from it. 

It is equally undeniable that call center services are expensive to set up and maintain. Several factors contribute to this- 

Why Ecommerce Call Centers are Thought to be Money Holes?

Infrastructural Needs

Besides the office space and the technological infrastructure, an eCommerce contact center heavily relies on agents or human resources. As if finding the right talent wasn’t a painstaking task in itself, customer support requires intensive training. However, the industry has one of the highest attrition rates, causing a significant cost increase. 

Seasonality

Apart from this, Ecommerce itself is privy to seasonality. This means the number of orders fluctuates based on the time of the year. These fluctuations also result in discrepancies in ticket volumes every year. 

Now, most business owners tackle this issue by outsourcing customer support to keep up with a boost in demand. But they end up compromising on the quality of customer support in the process. Not to mention, monitoring third-party agents can be a daunting task in itself. 

Efficiency

One of the most overlooked factors contributing to a rise in costs is the ineffective use of agents’ time. Gone are the days when your agents spent time answering monotonous questions and “resolving tickets.” 

When agents spend time on low-value conversations like help with cancellations, refunds, or tracking, you’re not only underutilizing the resource you’re spending big bucks on but also missing out on the high-value opportunities waiting in your inbox.

Customer support is a primary factor that determines customer satisfaction, and when used right, it can act as a revenue channel. 

How to Optimize your Ecommerce Call Center for Better Profits & Lower Costs: 

Reducing the agent churn rate is the key to cutting costs on your eCommerce customer support call center. Agent happiness is the driving force behind all successful customer support teams. Here are some ways in which you can ensure genet happiness in your company: 

1. Performance and Reporting

Your agent performance metrics should reflect your purpose. Suppose you measure performance on time-based metrics like average call time or the number of queries agents attend. In that case, they are tempted and bound to hurry things along, affecting the quality of customer support. Not only this, it adds pressure to perform, resulting in increased stress levels. Encourage agents to work for the customers and not against the clock. Measure performance based on their impact. Monitor the revenue they bring or the customer satisfaction scores instead.

This will help them shift their outlook towards work, encourage them to solve problems instead of deflecting them, and push them towards more meaningful work by valuing their inputs and impact. The accurate measure of customer support is the revenue it drives in. unfortunately, most businesses fail to measure this and reward their team members accordingly. 

The right eCommerce call center software will help you monitor the right metrics, like the revenue bought in by CS, and measure the bottom line impact of your agents’ efforts. Richpanel’s reporting features allow CX leaders to track these metrics and work towards building a customer support system that customers will appreciate.

2. Provide Tools and Training:

Customer support is a demanding job. It requires a lot of empathy and patience. But there’s no reason your agents can’t have things more accessible. The right eCommerce call center software will help them avoid redundant and mundane tasks and help them focus on things that truly matter- the customer experience. 

Automation can help avoid redundancy and increase transparency in your day-to-day processes. Whether it is setting up canned responses for order confirmation or letting the customers know that their complaints have been registered even outside of working hours- using automation to avoid piling small queries on your agents. 

One of the reasons why eCommerce customer service software like Richpanel makes a big difference in employee satisfaction is because it enhances the agent experience. It allows agents to see complete unified customer profiles with all their order history and relevant information. Instead of toggling between multiple tabs to get an answer to a simple question, your agents can breeze through the conversations. Not only this, collaborative features like notes and tagging can help speed things up. 

The robust reporting features mentioned in the previous section also help champion this cause. You can quickly identify the best customer conversations (either with high CSAT scores or the ones that convert customers) and use them as training material for your agents. 

Your agents should feel like you’re on their team. The right tools will help set them up for success and improve the ROI of your eCommerce customer support call center. 

3. Drive Maximum Context

Your call center set-up shouldn’t be just about seeing through the countless inbound support calls and bothering customers with all the inputs. The focus should be on minimizing effort from customers and delivering maximum value in the shortest time possible.

Agent enablement becomes a critical component in making this possible. By the time the agent answers the call, she should be able to anticipate what the query might be about. If that’s far-fetched an expectation, one should certainly have the basic information about the customer, their recent order history, and recent conversation history so as to contextualize the conversation.

The absence of this will make the customer run around in a circle, eventually leading to disowning your brand. 

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How to Set up a Profitable Call Center for your eCommerce Business?

The way we see it, there are three components that contribute to the success of eCommerce call centers- effective processes, robust technology, and agent happiness. These three cogs help churn out profits from customer support channels, including call center services. With the right processes, and tools to support them, agent productivity and employee satisfaction increase significantly, and everything falls into place. 

So how can eCommerce merchants can launch a profitable call center in minutes:‍

‍Here is an integration that makes every E-commerce customer service team go. It just makes sense. If you are using Richpanel as your customer service platform, with a couple of clicks you have yourself a robust call center application, thanks to our slick yet deep integration with Aircall.

Aircall is a leading call solution for customer-facing teams. They let teams quickly get set up with a cloud telephony system and manage calls from your mobile phones and desktop apps.

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This powerful integration is already powering some of the best eCommerce customer service teams such as SNOW, Thinx, and Bumpboxx. Let’s understand why these two systems together are arguably the best E-commerce call center unit

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Richpanel-Aircall: Why pick these two apps to work together?

1. See who's calling

When your phone rings, Richpanel will display an insights card on the Aircall app. The card shows valuable information such as the caller's name, lifetime value, total orders placed, last order date, and more.

So your agents have full context about the caller and don't waste time collecting caller information.

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2. Automate Call Logging & Notes Capture in CRM

Save 10s of hours each week otherwise wasted in logging call notes in CRM. Richpanel automates the process of logging calls and capturing notes for you. Whenever an agent answers a call in the Aircall App, Richpanel automatically generates a ticket in real-time. Aircall assigned the key to the agent who answered the call. At the end of the call, notes taken on Aircall and the call recording will be logged and attached to the ticket in Richpanel.

Read Also: Guide on Customer Service Automation

3. Create Invoices and Capture Payments

Let your agents close the sale over the phone. With the integration in place, your agents can now create draft orders, send invoices and receive payments from the customer.

4. Training

Aircall allows you to monitor calls. It helps CX leaders provide valuable feedback and train the employees to do their best. Combined with robust analytics, you can quickly identify what script works or what areas of your customer support need improvement. Aircall can help bring out the best in your customer support team.

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How to set up your Ecommerce Call Center?

The below steps are a guide to starting a Shopify Call Center. But you can use similar measures for Magento & WooCommerce too.

• If you don't already have a Richpanel account, sign up here. You can connect your Shopify store and support channels during the setup. We support these channels natively - email, Facebook, Instagram & live chat. The estimated setup time is 10 minutes.
• To add a phone, you will need to signup with Aircall. Once you create your account, you can port your existing number or buy a new one. Follow the setup steps to set up the IVR tree, voicemails, and routing rules.
• Next, you can connect the two apps with just two clicks. Voila - you have your Shopify Call Center ready. You can now start supporting customers on all channels from one place.
• You can refer to this guide for detailed installation instructions.
  

Get a demo now

This integration is for you if you want to start a Call Center for your Shopify/Magento/WooCommerce store. Get your questions answered and see a live demo of a working Ecommerce call center.

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