Ecommerce is complicated, and that includes handling customer problems after purchase. Specifically, your inbound call center is one of the most important parts of the post-purchase customer experience. Indeed, it is critical that your business provides a positive call center experience.  In this article, find out about the importance of increasing the maturity of your call center. Also, find out what technology is needed for your call center to implement multichannel communications, Lastly, what is an omnichannel contact center and the importance of implementing an unified data view of your customer’s order status.

1. Assessing And Planning – Set The Stage For A Spectacular Call Center Experience

Store clerks used to be the main form of customer service, but with ecommerce this has changed. Now customer contact centers take the lead, but many of these operations need an upgrade. In particular, inbound call centers are not providing excellent customer service. Examples of poor experiences include customers being on hold for too long and customer service agents not having enough information. Further, customers routinely get passed from one agent to another without resolution.

If your ecommerce business is not providing excellent customer service, you need to do some planning now rather than later. Specifically, one good idea is for you to assess your operation using a call center maturity model. Positively, this is a great way to assess and address deficiencies affecting your customers’ call center experience. To list, below are the 5 levels of a Customer Experience Management Maturity Model.

• Level 1: Ad hoc. No owners.
• Level 2: Centralize. IT team manages.
• Level 3: Manage. A business team manages.
• Level 4: Optimize. Led by a C-level change agent or COO.
• Level 5: Inform. Have reached both digital and CX maturity and focused on continuous improvement.

For more specifics on the Customer Experience Management Maturity Model, see my article. More Excellent Customer Service Results From Your eCommerce Contact Center. Also, this article identifies Key Performance Indicators (KPI) that you can use to start delighting your customers

2. Implement Multichannel Technology To Improve Your Customers’ Call Center Experience.

Your customers are online and connected. Hence, implementing multichannel technology is critical to your customers’ positive call center experience. So to implement, you need to be thinking of your call center as a contact center with multiple communications channels. Additionally, you need to know your options with multichannel communications technology. Further, you need to determine the right contact center software that meets your specific business needs. To detail see below.

a. Multichannel Implementation – What Is A Contact Center And Why Implement?

First, times have changed where customer communications choices were only by face-to-face or over the phone.  In these cases, a business would either have store clerks or customer service agents operating out of a call center. Now. especially for ecommerce businesses, you need to be using a whole range of multichannel communications. Obviously, these communications channels need to be the same ones that your customers normally use. Specifically, when customers contact you, you must quickly and efficiently get their problems resolved. For example, this can include via web, e-mail, text, or their favorite social media communications channel.

So, today many companies, especially ecommerce businesses, operate a call center. For a description, below is a call center definition:

“… is a team of agents that handle all incoming and outgoing customer communications via phone calls, email, live chats, social media interactions, and other communication channels.”

nextiva

b. Multichannel Implementation – Communications Technology.

Indeed, there are a wide range of communications technologies you can use to have an effective multichannel contact center. Unquestionably, these technologies, if effectively used and managed, can go a long way to increase your contact center’s maturity level and to delight your customers. Also, even if you are a small business, you can start using most of these communications technologies at little cost. Specifically, below is a list of multichannel communications options.

List of Multichannel Communications Channels

1. Telephone / Voice Over IP (VoIP). VoIP is basically a digital phone system. In particular for a call center, this has a lot of advantages over traditional phones as you can integrate numerous software add-ons and capture data about calls. 
2. Social Media. Many businesses use social media such as Facebook to communicate with their customers.
3. Text / Short Message Service (SMS). You can provide a text address for customers to contact you.
4. Chatbots. Besides traditional rules-based chatbots, there are more advanced, autonomous chatbots are powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI).
5. Mobile Apps / Video Calls. This can include communications software such as WhatsApps or apps like Zoom.
6. Online Video. Many small businesses use YouTube for customer training and self- troubleshooting videos.
7. Multi-lingual Support. More and more software can facilitate communications in different languages or use bilingual agents where justified.

Note: If you set up a customer communications channel, you need to have an effective method to respond when a customer contacts you. Undeniably, there is nothing worse than not responding to a customer, especially one that has a problem.

3. Omnichannel Software Implementation.

Most call centers now use some type of contact center management software. Further, the majority of contact center software is now cloud-based and it is called Software as a Service (SaaS). Specifically, this where a business does not host the software, but will usually incurs monthly subscription-based charges for each call center agent using the software. By using contact center SaaS, most businesses can quickly start utilizing its most advanced features. Below is a list of the 11 most promising technological breakthroughs in contact center SaaS offerings. These cutting-edge capabilities are poised to greatly improve contact center performance and the customer experience.

1. Cloud-Based Contact Center: Flexible and Scalable.
2. Advanced Workforce Engagement Tools for Contact Center Managers.
3. Live AI Agent Assist, Note Taking, and Training.
4. AI-Powered Self-Service Knowledge-Base and Automated Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Chatbots.
5. Intelligent Customer Routing and Callback Systems for Contact Center Operation.
6. Contact Center Advanced Analytics: Diagnose and Optimize Customer Experience and Efficiency.
7. Omnichannel Communications: Unified Customer Experience Across Media Channels.
8. Higher Reliability and Call Quality for Contact Center Operations.
9. Integrations and API Ecosystems: Seamless Software Synergies.
10. Security: Balancing Customer Usability Vs Authentication and Compliance.
11. Personalized Attention and Responses: CRM Integration and Tailoring the Customer Experience.

For a detailed discussion of these 11 breakthrough contact center SaaS capabilities, see my article, Contact Center SaaS: The Best Emerging Tech To Make Your Customers First.

Click here where I’ll showcase 11 of the latest technological breakthroughs poised to greatly improve contact center performance and the customer experience. Let’s start with what a cloud-based SaaS can offer both small and large businesses.

The Delighted, Connected Customer: Sure Ways To Make Call Centers Omnichannel And Data Rich

Also, for more discussions on Omnichannel contact center from a business perspective, see my article, The Delighted, Connected Customer: Reasons Call Centers Need To Be Omnichannel. This article explains how to get a unified view of the customer experience, the importance of connecting to your customers, and the capabilities needed to make it all happen.

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