It’s impossible to imagine eCommerce support teams that don’t use phone as a channel. In fact, phone is one of the earliest channels support teams use apart from email. 

It’s not surprising because call support humanizes your eCommerce brand. It’s also equally unsurprising that phone support is one of the most challenging channels for agents to handle. 

Integrating your call center with the rest of the channels is essential to make it easier on the agent, and a traditional phone line will not help you do that. 

In this blog, we’ll be sharing learnings from Bumpboxx on how they solved many common support challenges using an integrated tech stack with the help of Richpanel & Aircall. 

Founded in 2016, Bumpboxx’s vision is to bring back the joy of listening to music to the old-school flare of the 80s through a passion for loud boomboxes. 

When sales started picking up during the pandemic, so did support tickets, and soon their customer support team was backed up in 600+ emails. They had thought of rapidly expanding their team from 2 to 15 to keep up with the growth and manage customer queries. Instead, they handled their support tickets with 4 reps and Richpanel as their CRM. 

Evaluating the Right Customer Support Tools

Bumpboxx’s Customer Support Manager, Christina Ebersole, wanted to move away from traditional phone support because it limited their support performance on phone as a channel. At the same time, Richpanel made it easy for them with emails, social media, and their website. 

Christina evaluated Aircall, a cloud phone solution, among other phone support apps, based on Richpanel's suggestion as they had built a deep integration with Aircall. Almost like an extension of their own product. Christina chose Aircall because of its ease of use & since it met their needs the most out of all the other programs. 

Having a connected tech stack was one of her priorities, and Aircall’s robust integration with Richpanel only made her evaluation much more effortless. 

With Richpanel & Aircall making up Bumpboxx’s support tech stack, the whole proved to be greater than the sum of its parts. Christina and her team solved most of the challenges that customer support teams face by themselves. 

“Aircall was the best one out of all the other programs out there, and it was the easiest one to use, the way it integrates seamlessly, it was like Richpanel & Aircall was made to go hand-in-hand” - Christina Ebersole, Bumpboxx.

Related Read: Guide to Set up Call Center for Ecommerce

Common eCommerce Support Challenges & How Bumpboxx Solved them with Aircall & Richpanel

Customer service reps face many daily challenges when trying to solve customer problems. While covering every possible scenario is impossible, a little forethought goes a long way in being prepared. 

Providing a Consistent Customer Experience

Customers often feel they'll get unique answers if they message multiple times via different channels or threads.

Sometimes customers may switch channels and engage with customer support - they might have raised the initial request via email or social media and called the support team via phone looking for a quick resolution. 

In these cases, your helpdesk and phone support channels need to sync and piece together customer information to identify if tickets are coming from the same customer.

Richpanel, due to its integration with Aircall, can identify customers making multiple requests through different channels and merge these tickets. This allowed Bumpboxx to have a single view of a customer and prevented other agents from answering the same customer multiple times. 

Getting this right was particularly important for Bumpboxx because they sell fairly medium-to-high ticket hardware products.  

While Richpanel automated about 50% of repetitive queries, this significantly reduced the volume of tickets in the queue and ensured tickets that require human support alone were routed to the agents. 

“50% of our customers do not even reach the ticket queue and just help themselves thanks to Richpanel’s customer self-serve capabilities ” - Christina Ebersole, Bumpboxx.

Case Study: How BumpBoxx Resolves Customer Queries in 5 Sec!

Solving for Agent Productivity

A massive part of agent productivity involves enabling them with the right tools and data to avoid making their jobs harder than they already are. 

Bumpboxx understood that as an eCommerce business in this competitive market, it’s essential to provide exceptional customer support by being present across multiple platforms. This ensures that customers are provided with options to get in touch through a platform that they are comfortable with.

But presence across multiple channels also means that agents must constantly switch between various platforms. Platform hopping and fragmented customer data eat up time that could be otherwise spent answering queries. 

“We were 600+ emails behind before implementing Richpanel, and it just took us 3 hours to catch up after installing Richpanel as our customer support CRM.” - Christina Ebersole, Bumpboxx.

Since Bumpboxx used Richpanel & Aircall, even if they get a call, customer context from Richpanel flows into Aircall with its contact cards feature, and their agents can handle other channels inside Richpanel without switching platforms. 

If agents are busy on other calls, Aircall’s call waiting keeps customers on hold instead of letting it go unanswered and automatically routes it to the next available agent. 

With Richpanel, agents can load up templates that they can personalize with customer data points. Use macros to take everyday actions such as adding tags, initiating refunds, cancellations, exchanges, etc. 

Instead of thinking from scratch, agents reply faster, not worrying about data sanity or maintaining CRM hygiene. 

Training & Continuously Coaching your Support Reps

With the holiday season around the corner, it’s not unusual for eComm brands to expand their support team by hiring temporary or permanent staff. Regardless of the holiday season, it’s crucial to have a set training cadence to ensure the smooth onboarding of new hires. 

Bumpboxx utilized Aircall’s call recording feature to help new hires listen to their best-performing agents and observe them on live calls without interfering with the customer’s experience. 

After 2-3 weeks of shadowing agents, listening to calls, and getting used to the templates, macros, and tools, the new agents are slowly introduced into the support queue to handle live tickets. Their manager listens to their calls to provide feedback until they’re comfortable enough to handle situations independently. 

Agents are trained to face situations where they have to think on their feet. For example, they might not know the answer to a query or deal with an angry or a disgruntled customer. 

In cases where they don’t know an answer, they can either get someone’s help within the team by using Richpanel’s private notes feature or hand off the customer to other agents by tagging the team member who can help the customer. 

While dealing with an unhappy customer, the agents are coached or assisted on the live call by their manager using Aircall’s call whispering feature. This way, agents feel they are supported to handle difficult situations without having to escalate. 

If escalations are necessary, they are handled efficiently by tagging their manager in private notes while setting some initial context with minimal interference to the customer’s support experience, i.e., without needing to be put on hold for extended periods. 

Monitoring & Tracking Customer Service Performance

The main goal of customer service is to ensure customers are happy with their experience with the brand and they are satisfied with the product. To understand and continuously improve customer satisfaction, businesses measure initial response times, resolution times, feedback ratings, etc. 

But for eComm businesses, gathering data usually means putting them together manually in spreadsheets and trying to make sense of them. In Bumpboxx’s case, they avoided the grunt work in compiling data and visually representing it by utilizing Aircall & Richpanel’s reporting. 

With Aircall, they can track first call resolutions, average call length, avg. call waiting time. With Richpanel, they can track ticket volume, first response times, resolution times, resolution rate, CSAT, NPS, etc., all within a single platform. 

This helps provide valuable insights into the support team's performance and the overall business. By combining qualitative data from customers, agents, and tickets with quantitative data from reports, Bumpboxx ensures that the metrics they are tracking are indeed helping them achieve their primary goal of customer happiness. 

“Before, customers had to wait two weeks for a callback, and now it's almost immediate. Our first response time is 30 seconds. So everyone is happy using Aircall & Richpanel, both the customer and the agent.” - Christina Ebersole, Bumpboxx.

Often investing in a support team is perceived as a cost of doing business. While everyone knows that a great customer experience can lead to more revenue, companies have difficulties quantifying their support team’s impact on their bottom line. 

But with Richpanel’s revenue reporting, Bumpboxx can attribute the impact of their agents’ efforts to revenue. Richpanel automatically attributes customer purchases based on agents’ recommendations or purchases after a support interaction as revenue influenced by agents. 

Last year alone, Bumpboxx drove $150K+ in revenue directly attributable to customer interactions with their support team. 

Conclusion

The eCommerce industry is a highly competitive landscape where even the smallest advantages over your competitors help you enjoy outsized benefits, especially with customer support being a major differentiating factor in retaining customers. 

By ensuring a connected tech stack with Richpanel as their helpdesk/customer service CRM & Aircall as their phone support, Bumpboxx has been able to improve agent productivity, reduce costs by maintaining a lean team, and constantly improve customer and agent experience. 

Just like Bumpboxx, you, too, can ensure the efficient use of your team’s resources with the right tools, processes, and systems in place. You can start improving your agent’s productivity by booking a demo with Richpanel today!