To keep your customers loyal and satisfied, you must ensure that your customer support services are responsive and updated. A good way to provide such service while minimizing costs is by outsourcing your retail call center services to an external provider.
By outsourcing your call center needs, you can offer your customers the most efficient service from a company with expertise in the customer service industry. With the money you save through outsourcing, you can reinvest and devote more resources to meeting your core business objectives.
Let OutPLEX Supply Your Retail Call Center Needs
In addition to our domestic operations, OutPLEX has call centers in Colombia and the Dominican Republic. According to Forbes, call centers in Latin American countries offer a wider range of advantages than do centers in other locations, whether in the United States or further abroad. These advantages include:
- Convenient time zones: Our call centers share time zones with much of the United States, so our agents are available and alert when your customers need them.
- Lower operating costs: It costs less to operate in Latin America than in the United States. These considerable savings are passed on to you as the client.
- Multilingualism: Our agents speak clear and fluent English, Spanish, and often additional languages, so there is no need to worry about a language barrier between them and your customers.
OutPLEX offers additional retail call center services that can help your business, such as:
- Agent training: We teach our agents to interact with your customers in ways that align with your mission statement and culture. This helps you build a cohesive brand and a seamless support experience for your patrons.
- Agent retraining: If an approach no longer works or your business goals change, we retrain our agents to alter their interactions accordingly.
- Tech support: Our engineers are on call all day, every day, to respond to any issues that may arise with software or hardware. This ensures you’re always online and available to shoppers.
Meeting Your Goals Through a Retail Call Center
Running a retail/e-commerce business means constantly striving to provide your customers with better value while maintaining or increasing your profits. At any given moment, your business goals may involve:
- Improving customer retention
- Growing your customer base
- Improving customer satisfaction
- Increasing upselling
- Expanding profit margins
- Increasing awareness of a product
- A combination of the above
OutPLEX has a diverse array of call center solutions that can help you meet your business goals. Our call center agents can provide numerous services to you and your customers, including:
- Answering tough questions: When a customer calls with a difficult or complex problem, our agents will maintain a compassionate demeanor and work with them to correct it.
- Following up with customers: After your customer receives (or should have received) a good or service, our agents can check to make sure everything went well. If there is an issue, they can take steps to resolve it.
- Encouraging continued patronage: If a customer calls to cancel an order or service, an agent can quickly find out why and try to solve the issue in such a way that the customer decides not to cancel after all.
- Telling your customers about special deals: A live agent can offer your customers additional products or services relevant to their past or current purchases, thus encouraging more/higher sales.
- Making your customers feel appreciated: Our agents know how to lend a sympathetic ear to frustrated customers. This can make all the difference, especially in situations where the customer’s issue cannot be immediately resolved.
The customer service experience you provide can significantly impact customers’ perceptions of, and loyalty to, your brand. Make a good impression by outsourcing your retail call center services and other communications needs to OutPLEX. By outsourcing call center services to us, you relieve your company of the burden of:
- Paying for internal CX employees: Contracting with an outsourced provider eliminates your obligation to pay skyrocketing domestic labor rates and eliminates overhead on those employees. Nearshore labor is roughly half the cost of internal employees and also removes the burden of training your own personnel.
- Finding and maintaining a space for call center operations: Depending on your company’s size and location, you may have to lease or purchase additional space to accommodate the required personnel and equipment.
- Selection and mastery of new technologies: There is an abundance of options when selecting the right software and hardware for your call center operations. OutPLEX has a variety of vendor partnerships we endorse and work with to ensure the best fit for your needs.
OutPLEX has over 20 years experience providing quality customer service solutions. This allows your brand to focus on what you do best: running a retail/e-commerce business customers trust and rely on.
Going Beyond Call Centers to Provide Good Customer Service
As Tata Consultancy Services explained in a 2020 report, retailers who better equip themselves to handle their customers’ needs digitally are poised for greater long-term success because more and more customers are shopping online. These retailers can also respond faster to emergencies or other unexpected developments, thus providing increased value to their customers.
In addition to call center services, OutPLEX offers digital communication solutions such as:
- Chatbot automation: Adding conversational AI automated chat to your website can enable customers to solve their own inquiries rather than creating a bottleneck in the call center queue.
- IVR deflection: Interactive voice response kicks in when a customer calls a call center. IVR will identify customer intent and divert them to the agent or channel best equipped to handle their concern.
- Digital messaging: Many customers like using SMS texting or social media messaging services (e.g., Facebook Messenger) to interact with brands.
It may seem counterintuitive, but implementing efficient digital solutions like those outlined above does not negate the benefits of maintaining an outsourced call center. On the contrary, it can improve the service experience for all of your customers, including those who call into a call center. This is because digital channels are adept at:
- Answering simple questions: Digital channels can provide immediate answers to queries about customer accounts, orders, subscriptions, sales, and other common topics.
- Reducing calls to a call center: By resolving many FAQs online or through digital messaging, you free up call center agents to deal with more complex concerns that require human assistance.
- Offering further assistance: A digital channel can offer to message the customer with more information, provide a link to a relevant page on your website, or even connect the customer with a live agent, intercepting the contact before it requires human assistance.
- Lowering costs: Efficient digital channels cost far less to maintain than live agents in a call center.
Improving Customer Satisfaction through Digital Channel Offerings
A great way to keep your customers satisfied is by communicating with them through their preferred channels. The Conversocial State of CX Trends Report 2021 found that:
- 28% of customers said that “great customer experiences” was the main factor driving their loyalty to a brand.
- 28% of customers said that the most important part of good customer service was being contacted over their preferred channel.
- 21% of customers said the “most infuriating” part of bad customer service was not being contacted over their preferred channel.
This information (pages 9-10 of the linked study) shows why it is paramount for businesses to reach out to customers via their preferred channels. The more channels you offer your customers, the greater chance you have of fulfilling their expectations.
OutPLEX Has All the Communication Solutions You Need
For more information about OutPLEX’s e-commerce and retail call center services, contact us today for a free quote. We can help you design and implement a CX strategy that meets your needs and budget. We make it easy to outsource your customer communications and maintain a level of service that aligns with your brand.
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