Do Call Centre Services Give Retail a Competitive Advantage?

IT hardware retail businesses are going online. Many are already on the large E-commerce platforms. Some have their own websites. Most are integrated into an online E-store platform. It’s essential that they are integrated into the online system in these times of remote work.

Brands spend millions of rupees to ensure customer delight for a long term engagement with him or her. But some industries need to do more than others to ensure a great customer experience.

Online System and Contact Centre

More than 50% of the consumers have shifted online to buy required products and services. The online customers love to explore options and settle for the one with the best service and how a brand treats them. Call centres play a major role here. Most customer enquiries are tackled by tele-customer care executives and we all know it can make or break a deal. A brand that promises the customer to get back in 24 hours and does call the customer is a first step to winning a loyal customer. This is irrespective of the industry the business is in – movie tickets, organic farm etc.

In some industries, call centre service is a support system, but it is a more definitive service in others. For example, a car insurance company. Although many car insurance services offer on-road assistance, they often receive distress calls in the middle of the night asking for help for a car that has broken down at an unfamiliar place to the driver. Here, the tele executive has the dual responsibility of dealing with a business-related issue and the customer's anxiety that s/he must be going through. A company that can’t respond to distress calls like this one end up losing customers.

Similarly, other industries such as retail – online shopping, banking, healthcare, telemarketing, a logistics firm and others with a large customer base must have very strong call centre support to deal with queries.

Call Centres and Retail

Offline stores must have at least a website and must be linked to at least an E-portal for retailers in today’s world. The online system has a tricky aspect – when a customer browses online, s/he is often not sure about the quality and other features of a product to decide whether s/he should go for it. In such a case, a customer care executive who can satisfactorily respond to customer queries and connect them to a senior person of the retailer helps the customer to make a decision about purchase. This increases the sale of the retailer.

The Business Advantage

In a typical contact centre, executives work on a contact centre platform accessing customer details through CRM, managing requests in a ticketing tool, and working on other tools. These solutions aim to reduce the manual work so that the executives can focus more on customer service. Such solutions prove to be useful in upgrading the productivity level of the executives.

Amit Kumar Gandhi, Founder of NovelVox says, “While there are many contact center solutions available, a company must embrace an integrated and unified solution to ease agent's overall stress at work. If an agent keeps switching between the applications to provide relevant information, it increases the manual work and the whole point of IT adoption is futile. Contact centers nowadays are just not addressing the communication flow but also easing up the entire customer journey with AI, integrated knowledge base and voice bots. This fusion model of AI and human personalization is making customers move to self-help services with the feel of being empowered. Even the use of human skills for advanced queries is bringing efficiency at scale.”

With optimum contact centre solution, industries can gain a solid competitive edge, especially as the world is limiting itself to dealing with brands via mobile phones.

Read more from Dr Archana Verma by clicking here.