08.29.2023 Jonathan Kirkland
Statistics from the National Retail Foundation found that a staggering 20 to 40 percent of yearly sales for small and mid-sized retailers take place within the last two months of the year. Additionally, a study from LiveChat found that on average, retail websites receive 63 percent more visits during the holiday season - and can expect up to 120 percent more website visits on the busiest days.
With the holiday shopping season just weeks away, a retail brand’s customer service team should now be planning ahead for omni-channel support for the upcoming Black Friday, Cyber Monday and other key high volume dates.
No matter how effective your current in-house customer service team is, it’s unlikely that your company will have the resources needed to be able to keep up with this type of demand.
A jump in call volumes, an increase in customer service queries and a rise in the number of sales that need to be closed, will stretch your team. And with that extra pressure, your customer experience (CX) and customer satisfaction metrics could suffer - having a long-term consequence for your business.
The same study from LiveChat, found the bigger demands during the holiday season lead to slower answers from agents as they need up to 10 seconds more to reply, meanwhile each chat in November and December is longer by an average of 1 to 1.5 minutes.
This means your retail business could need up to 77 percent more agents to handle your company’s busiest times, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Hiring seasonal in-house staff is time consuming, complex, inefficient, and expensive.
So, what’s the solution? Outsourcing your customer service team to an experienced and high-tech outsourced call center.
How can an outsourced call center help?
If you don’t currently outsource your customer service to a nearshore call center, it’s likely that you brace yourself for the holiday season and do the best you can. With customer experience now playing a more important role in winning customer loyalty and meeting expectations, this is no longer enough if you want to wow your customers.
By outsourcing your customer service to an outsourced contact center, you’ll be able to access specialized industry knowledge, innovative CX-focused technologies and experienced customer service agents that you simply wouldn’t be able to afford to implement into your in-house customer service team.
Here are four ways that an outsourced call center will help you both ramp up and improve your customer experience metrics this festive season:
1 - Scale up for the holiday season
Scaling up your workforce for the holiday season is expensive. Not only do you have to source the right workers, onboard them, pay them a fair wage and invest in new equipment for them to do their job, you’ll also have to let them go once the season ends.
An outsourced call center, however, will be able to offer scalable solutions that allow your company to easily and seamlessly scale up and down for the busy holiday season. This will ensure your customers’ expectations are being met.
2 - Encourage customers to answer their own questions
Your brand can save a significant chunk of customer service time, as well as improve the overall customer experience, by simply giving customers the tools they need to answer their own questions.
Omni-channel self-service tools allow your customers to immediately resolve any issues they are facing, this, in turn, reduces the customer effort and improves customer satisfaction with your brand. Not only that, but it frees up customer service representatives to work on more complex customer queries.
3 - Highly-trained agents who work as brand ambassadors
The top nearshore call centers will be able to provide your company with highly-skilled customer service representatives that are 100 percent focused on the growth and success of your business.
For example, customer service agents here at Advantage Communications (ACI) are hired and trained to be true ambassadors of your brand. Each agent at ACI receives comprehensive training and coaching on your brand culture, meaning they deliver the same fantastic customer service as your in-house team.
4 - Access to world-class customer service technologies
Implementing innovative customer service technologies into your in-house team can be time-consuming and expensive. Unfortunately, however, these technologies are essential if you want to deliver a truly amazing experience for your customers - especially over the busy holiday period.
With an outsourced call center, you’ll have access to technologies such as contact center AI, live-call guidance, operational intelligence and many other tools that vastly improve your agent’s ability to deliver superior customer service and improve customer contact metrics.
Ready to find out how exactly outsourcing your customer service department to Advantage Communications will help your retail brand scale up and deliver superior customer experiences during the Christmas season? Contact us today. Our team of experts would be more than happy to answer any questions you have.
