The shopping frenzy of Black Friday and Christmas is fast approaching, and this year looks set to be an even more challenging season thanks to the ongoing supply chain disruption that is affecting businesses across multiple sectors from manufacturing to logistics and retail.
Inevitably, shoppers eager to pick-up their bargains, whether from shops or online, are likely to be impacted by the disruption with frustrating order delays and lack of product availability, resulting in spikes in customer complaints, made worse at a time when resources will be more stretched than usual with many customer service agents still working remotely.
How these customer complaints are dealt with can make a huge difference between losing business and actually strengthening the all-important customer relationship. Fortunately, technology can play a key role in assisting retail contact centres to prepare themselves for any level of demand and to make sure quality customer service is always able to be delivered by using the best cloud-based contact centres.
Self-service options
Invariably, customers want their issues dealt with quickly and efficiently, where many expect to receive a response from an email within an hour and an answer to a tweet within minutes. However, this can be mitigated if information is readily available where self-service options are provided, giving customers access to information and status updates on when to expect the delivery of their order for example.
Cloud connectivity and video collaboration
Consumers expect their customer service experience to be an easy and straight-forward process, but they also want to be able to connect at a personal level, and not forced to speak with an automated robot or placed on hold in a long waiting queue.
Video conferencing can serve as an effective channel to establish more personal connections with customers. Often when faced with a problem, particularly a technical one, customers may require some handholding through issues. Having a service agent on hand, working through an issue can make the process a lot easier, with the added convenience of offering co-browsing capabilities and sharing URLs, saving time and further frustration.
And during this time of the pandemic, cloud contact centres enable customer service agents working from home the ability to connect via a video platform from anywhere that has internet access.
Having the answer to hand
Having clear customer service processes are pointless if the retailer is unable to provide a satisfactory answer for a customer’s complaint.
Therefore, use of a centralised knowledge base can underpin the customer service process, providing agents with instant access to the latest and consistent information to resolve issues.
This same knowledge can power customer-facing self-service solutions that make it easy for consumers to help themselves. Options such as web self-service, IVR, chatbots, automated emails and SMS all streamline the process. These all deflect more routine queries before they come into the contact centre and give customers faster answers, improving the customer experience.
Cloud technology invaluable in coping with upswings
Cloud technology can be invaluable to contact centres as they cope with larger than usual volumes of customer enquiries.
Retail contact centres can increase their capacity to match demand, whether it is planned or unplanned, all while only paying for what you use. And cloud-based contact solutions are also well suited to supporting remote working, allowing businesses to bring on additional agents to ‘ramp up’ quickly in case of an upsurge in demand.
Ahead of a time of increased customer demand, contact centres need to be agile enough to deal with this quickly and efficiently. The latest cloud contact centre solutions will allow this and much more, ensuring a smoother and more positive customer service experience.
By Gary Bennett, VP UKI/MEA/Northern Europe, Enghouse Interactive
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