It’s tough to keep your service levels up during peak periods, but it is crucial, especially in ecommerce. Good customer service experiences are vital in retaining customers while bad customer experience will not only scare away the customer but also their network. The following statistics, taken from Salesupply Ecommerce Customer Care Guide 2021 underwrite this:
- 91% say they are willing to use a webshop more often after a positive experience
- 60% will not return to your company after one bad experience
- 50% will tell others about a bad experience
And with customers that get more demanding every day, providing good customer service is not easy:
- 83% of consumers expect to speak to someone on the first attempt
- According to a study by Eptica, 48% of British consumers will end a chat session if their problem is not resolved within 5 minutes and 37% will end a service phone call if their question isn’t resolved within this timeframe
So how do you ensure the customer service experience during the holiday season? We asked Hans Siebum, Managing Director of Salesupply.
“Peak seasons are a recurring topic in our conversations with customer care – and operations managers”, says Hans. “Most segments have them and can often even mark them in their calendars. There is a garden webstore that knows that when it’s a sunny day and temperatures reach 18 C for the first day that year, their service channels explode. And online lamp stores know that the day after the winter daylight savings their peak season starts.”
“Still it remains difficult to temporarily extend customer care teams as well as opening hours. In addition to recruitment, this also requires extensive training and an investment in equipment. So the regular customer care teams experience growing back logs, an increase in cart abandonment and unhappy (read lost) customers.”
What can webstores do to anticipate and resolve the steep increase in events?
“They can choose to partially outsource their customer care to the Salesupply Customer Care team for the time their peak periods last. At Salesupply we call this Overflow Service. Our trained ecommerce customer care agents become part of the existing customer care team of the client and work together in the same system. This way webstores can keep their customer service at their regular level and they can even extend the opening hours of their customer care to evenings and weekends. A good example of a webstore that uses our Overflow Service is Shoebaloo.”