Call Centers Are Personalizing Holiday E-Commerce Customer Service

While retail stores worried about – and looked forward to – surging crowds on Black Friday weekend, the weekend after Thanksgiving, e-tailers and brick-and-mortar stores with strong online presences worried about “Cyber Monday (News - Alert),” the Monday after Thanksgiving, when shoppers swarm onto the Internet for online shopping. This year, Cyber Monday, or December 5, saw about 85 million visits to e-commerce Web sites.

The good news is that this number represented an 18 percent jump over last year. The bad news is that many contact centers were just not properly equipped to handle the rush, or the post-Christmas returns traffic to call centers. An extra challenge, in recent years, has been to deal with the number of callers who contact companies via their mobile phones. As a result, there has been a large upswing in the number of call center solutions providers who boast strong mobile customer service features.

One such company is U.K.-based Natterbox, which counts deal-of-the-day retailer Groupon among its clients. In a recent case-study article, Natterbox's CEO Neil Hammerton details how his company met Groupon's goal to improve its customer experience, increase loyalty and improve business efficiency.

“Groupon’s London-based call center is staffed by regional experts from all over the UK,” writes Hammerton. “Natterbox’s cloud-based system automatically recognizes the geographic location of individual callers and intelligently routes them to a regional expert. The experience for the customer calling from Edinburgh, for example, to discuss a Groupon deal in their city, is greatly improved because the agent has knowledge of the area and local offers. This empowers an international organization with a localized voice.”

Personalization such as this is what contact centers must achieve if they wish to develop loyal customers and the revenue benefits that will ensue as a result, says Hammerton. Another goal of the mobile-enabled call center is to store callers’ preferences so they can receive consistent, personalized service each time they call.

This might mean recalling their favorite hold music, or automatically connecting them to the same operator each time they call. Mobile-enabled call center solutions such as Natterbox allow service providers to store a wealth of customer and business information with every telephone number.

Want to learn more about the latest in communications and technology? Then be sure to attend ITEXPO East 2012, taking place Jan. 31-Feb. 3 2012, in Miami, FL. ITEXPO (News - Alert) offers an educational program to help corporate decision makers select the right IP-based voice, video, fax and unified communications solutions to improve their operations. It's also where service providers learn how to profitably roll out the services their subscribers are clamoring for – and where resellers can learn about new growth opportunities.

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