Customer Service Outsourcing: Retail Industry Guide

Amidst the existential challenges currently facing the retail industry, many businesses are seeking new solutions to deliver more sales and greater customer satisfaction. One trend that retailers have begun to leverage in their search for greater audience engagement is deploying an omnichannel-based sales strategy.

Omnichannel is a cross-channel, content-based strategy that businesses are using to enhance communications and boost sales with their audiences. It involves businesses engaging with their audiences via numerous channels, such as in physical company locations and other environments including phone, chat, e-commerce, mobile applications (including text), social media, personalized video, and augmented and mixed reality. The driving force behind these activities is to provide exemplary customer service and brand awareness in all of the media and other spaces that audiences use when and where they use them. This means that if customers and others start their experience with a business on one channel and shift to another, they know the business knows who they are (because it is everywhere they are) and can answer their needs.

The tactic has already worked well for several industries in which businesses are communicating frequently with audiences simultaneously on most, or all, of these channels. These include telecommunications, healthcare, and financial services. Retailers are relative newcomers to the trend.

Challenges for Retailers

The challenge for retail business owners is to provide constant customer contact that omnichannel requires while trying to focus on their core business. The effort can be burdensome as they try to deliver on their core product and service offerings at the same time as they engage in omnichannel’s constant contact.

What’s the best solution?

To answer this need to allow businesses to focus on their core expertise while still frequently communicating with their audiences, many retailers are choosing to outsource their customer service and omnichannel contact functions. This involves partnering with a trusted call center service that takes care of all of your customer contacts so you can focus on your business. The right call center understands your needs in each area of customer contact, creates a customized program to meet them, and trains its staff in your business’s policies and procedures.

In the process, you save time and money because you don’t need to hire, train, and provide benefits for more staff. You can scale the services the call center provides for you up or down depending on the season and your needs, easily add new sales territories, and add diverse languages to serve more customers.

Basic call center services that help retail businesses optimize inbound call management include:

Outbound call management services that call centers provide include:

The right call center trains their qualified staff to satisfy your company’s specific requirements in each of these functions, caring for your customers with the same commitment as your staff.

This same expertise extends to providing your retail business with specific new omnichannel services that support:

Live chat
Email
SMS
Mobile apps
Social media

Many retailers find that call centers are particularly adept with omnichannel as they have experience across all digital channels and stay current with emerging technologies, such as voice-activated shopping and augmented reality. Ultimately the right call center for your retail business will be your biggest brand advocate, providing exceptional customer service, contact, and satisfaction that delivers a boost in brand awareness and an increase in sales.

Responsive Call Center is the Right Choice for Retail Customer Omnichannel Communications

For more than 40 years, Responsive Call Center has served retailers and many other industries by providing live operators available all day, every day to handle virtually any kind of communication that provides customer service and satisfaction. Our state-of-the-art equipment and highly trained staff allow us to make sure you never miss an opportunity to positively engage with customers and potential customers.

What is the Difference between a Call Center and an Answering Service?

When deciding whether you need an answering service versus a call center, it’s important to understand the differences between the two. An answering service simply takes calls, routes calls, takes messages, and notifies you of emergency calls. A call center can also function as an answering service but it takes more complex and longer calls. Let’s examine the similarities and differences a bit further to ensure your business chooses the correct support.

Call Center Services

Call centers are set up differently than answering services in that they handle more operational support tasks like:

Customer service calls
Order and shipping management calls
Overflow calls
Virtual receptionist needs
Tech support services
Bilingual representative services
CRM & loyalty/renewal program

Answering Services

When determining if your business needs a call center versus answering services, an answering service would handle these types of tasks:

Sudden increase in call volume
Shorter call duration
Message taking and call relaying to another department
After hours answering and call routing
Live chat answering
Message forwarding

Both services answer calls and function as employees from your business. Call centers and answering services both also handle inbound and outbound calls. However, answering services are different from call centers in that agents typically are not providing additional information to the caller. Answering service agents are trained to properly take messages and route calls. In a call center, the agents are providing additional information and answering call questions. The call passed through an answering service will be much shorter in duration than one routed through a call center. Answering service calls are simpler in nature than call centers.

When understanding if your business needs a call center or answering service support, think of the nature of the call and how you would want the call to be answered and handled. From there, Responsive Call Center will work directly with you to map out a call flow and benchmarks needed in terms of call length. Responsive Call Center will provide your team with a recommendation if an answering service or a call center will be needed and which solution is best for you.

Responsive Call Center agents are trained to handle all different types of complex calls across verticals. Responsive Call Center agents work directly with your operations team to ensure quality, brand and message are carried through and every call is answered. Whether your business provides a medical or real estate service, the Responsive Call Center team will set up an introduction and on-boarding call directly with your employees to train in the company’s culture and expertise. The Responsive Call Center agents become a direct extension of your company providing your team the scalability and automation that is needed at this time. Free up your management and sales team to address core business related issues while the Responsive Call Center agents take care of your clients.

Let’s get started today to understand what type of service works best for your business and create a plan.

Our state-of-the-art equipment and highly trained staff allow us to make sure you never miss your customers’ calls again. Contact Responsive Call Center to find out more about how we can help you best manage the calls that are most important to you.

How to Stay in Touch in an “Always On” World

The right telephone answering service will be an expert at helping you employ a variety of communication methods to help you stay top-of-mind with your customers. At certain points of customer contact, it is crucial to know and employ the best communication methods for the purposes of positive customer response and conversion rates.

Here are a few tips on how to create and use the best direct response tactics:

Create a Customer Journey Map as Part of the Communication Plan

This will detail every step of your customers’ contact with your business so that you can align your communication with them to sync with each step in their process.

Communicate As Your Customers Do

Pay attention to how they communicate with their audiences and your company, and model your communications with them in the same way.

Create a Communication Plan to Address Customer Pain Points

Pain points that customers experience when interacting with your business can actually be opportunities to grow your business with them if they are handled well by staff. Creating a communication plan to address each of these is an important step in making that goal a reality.

Create a Communications Plan for Leveraging Your Customers’ Best Experiences

With the advent of social media, customers’ recommendations have become even more important than ever before. Create a communication plan to incentivize your happiest customers to spread the word.

Create a Communications Plan to Entice Back Inactive Customers

Chances are good that these prospects can be brought back into your company’s fold with the right contact and incentives.

Support Customers’ Preferences for Call, Text and/or Email Responses

Give your customers as many options as possible when it comes to communicating with your company.

Validate Your Customers’ Purchases

Make sure to have a communication plan to thank customers for doing business with you and highlight the positives of their purchases.

Keep Communication Simple

Make sure that all of your options for customer communication have as few steps as possible.

Timing is Crucial

Are you communicating with your customers when it is most important that they hear from you? Make sure that your communications don’t lag behind customer activity or desired activity.

Build Helpful Content into Your Communications Plans

When you offer information that your customers likely will find helpful in running their business or their own marketing efforts, they see you as adding value to their interaction with you and you build brand loyalty.

Make Sure Your Customer Communications are Consistent

Customers want to know that they can depend on you no matter what the reason is for contact with your company. Make sure your communications with them are consistent in terms of voice, frequency, and quality.

For more than 40 years, Responsive Call Center has created and managed customer communications plans for numerous industries, including medical, legal, commercial services (plumbing, HVAC, etc.), real estate and property management, construction, government agencies, and charities. Our team of live operators are available all day, every day to handle your business calls the same way you would; you will see the difference when your business no longer relies on answering machines or automated phone systems. Our highly trained staff will make sure you never miss your customers’ calls. Contact Responsive Call Center to discuss the ways we can help you manage your calls.

When Disaster Strikes, We’re Here to Make Sure Your Customers Are Taken Care Of

Hiring an Answering Service Before a Disaster Strikes

We have recently seen the damage that a natural disaster, such as a hurricane, can do to a community. A natural disaster can happen at any time, sometimes without warning and if we are lucky, the worst that we will deal with is a lack of power. Therefore, it’s important to always have a disaster recovery answering service ready for action.

But, if you own a business, especially one that has customers all over the country and relies heavily on Internet access, phones, and electricity to run successfully, a storm could wipe you out.

While some businesses can take months to years before they fully recover, a lot of businesses don’t come back because the loss of business during the aftermath was too financially damaging. The government actually estimates that roughly 40% of small companies never reopen following a weather-related disaster.

If a lot of your business is conducted over the phone, it is critical to have a back-up plan to safeguard your business, such as a disaster recovery call center.

Plan for the Worst and Hope for the Best

The idea of a natural disaster coming in and wiping out our communities is horrible in and of itself. And while the chances of this happening are slim, we have to plan for the worst.

In areas that are prone to earthquakes, all new construction takes this into account. In areas where extremely cold weather can turn into dangerous blizzards, our city government plans for school closings. Homes in hurricane areas often come with hurricane shutters or impact windows, but what are we doing to protect our businesses? Most often, the phone lines are down as well, so these solutions will not help our business function as usual.

Keep Business Booming – While You Work on the Repairs

Professional answering services can manage business calls, such as canceling appointments, notifying customers of the situation at hand, or even taking orders for customers who are not in the same area. An answering service can also manage notifying your employees about the current conditions at your business and whether or not they will need to report to the office. All of these duties taken off your hands, can bring you peace of mind.

Every region of the globe faces potential risks for natural disasters and the best way to handle them is to be prepared. Stock up on food and water, learn where the nearest shelters are, have backup generators, come up with an emergency plan and having a safeguard for your business to avoid experiencing downtime.

Call Responsive Call Center to discuss how we can help you be better prepared when disaster strikes.

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