Web Sites That Drive Customers to Call Centers
Here’s how some savvy call centers ensure that their standard of on-line communication with their customers is on par with the quality of their service over the phone.
Call centers are already an essential facet of brick and mortar retailers, and they are becoming equally important to electronic merchants as well.
Whether a business starts out by hanging a cedar shingle or an electronic shingle, it soon identifies the need for a call center. On-line catalogers quickly learn that they should have trained staff to help customers who have questions or problems with their purchases. They recognize that live service drives sales, both over the phone and over the Internet, so they incorporate call centers into their operations.
Just as electronic businesses are realizing the value of call centers, call centers are discovering the benefits of Web sites. Companies with traditional call centers are building Web sites to furnish their customers with new ways to reach agents.
When a call center chooses to enable its customers to reach call agents from a Web site, it undergoes two major changes.
The first change is that the call center becomes international. What may have started as a local operation confined to your local time zone suddenly becomes a 24-hour business.
The second change is that the Web site metamorphoses from an electronic document to a service. Because international toll calls are expensive, customers who live and work thousands of miles from your company appreciate the free, convenient option of communicating with agents from your Web site through e-mail, text chat or IP telephony.
Customers who use computers instead of phones to reach your call center don’t lower their expectations of quick responses. As recently as a few years ago, call centers could return e-mail messages within a few days without the risk of losing a sale. That’s not the case anymore, which is why a company needs a dedicated call center to answer its customers’ electronic communication with the same professionalism and with nearly the same urgency as phone calls.
A call center also needs the right software to be accessible from a Web site. E-mail is still the most common way customers contact call center agents. Although customers use text chat and voice over IP less frequently, these communication methods have the advantage of being live.
Live service from a Web site is still new, but it won’t be a novelty for long. The companies we profile here have ventured into what could be the next phase of electronic commerce -- where the Website is the call center.
How IP Telephony Helps On-Line Golf Retailer Sell Internationally
As a live way to communicate with agents, text chat has two advantages of voice over IP -- it is easier to implement and more consumers are willing to use it. But you don’t want to limit your customers to text chat.
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At GolfDiscount.com, customers can find out just how little they have to pay for top-of-the-line golf clubs by speaking with live agents using CosmoCall, software from CosmoCom that lets customers communicate with agents through voice over IP conversations or text chat. |
Tim Reha, the company’s director of electronic commerce, says that customers often ask questions about the pricing and availability of golf products. Many customers contact the company from outside North America to ask about shipping rates.
Besides its Web site, GolfDiscount.com has a toll-free number for North American callers, but since callers from outside the US and Canada have to make a toll call to reach the company, the Web site is the more practical option for international customers.
GolfDiscount.com usually has up to seven agents who are available to handle phone calls, e-mail messages, live text chat and voice over IP calls. The company declined to reveal daily call volume or exact daily e-mail volume, although it says it receives under 200 e-mail messages a day from customers.
One of the reasons that GolfDiscount.com lets customers reach live agents electronically is that the company does not display prices on its Web site.
"Because of some manufacturers’ policies, we can’t advertise prices on-line," says Reha. Instead, GolfDiscount.com makes prices available to customers on request.
GolfDiscount.com enabled potential customers to play electronic recordings of prices from its Web site for about four months before installing CosmoCom’s (Hauppauge, NY) CosmoCall software in August. Although the company still has audio files on its Web site, Reha finds that customers prefer the live on-line interaction that CosmoCall makes possible.
"It’s increased our chances of getting a sale," Reha says about CosmoCall. He is especially impressed with the international customer the Web site is attracting, and he estimates that between 50% and 70% of customers who communicate with agents through CosmoCall are from outside North America.
So far, voice over IP is not the primary medium for customers who use CosmoCall. Since August, more than 90% of CosmoCall sessions between agents and customers have occurred through live text chat.
Despite the low percentage of voice over IP calls, Reha is preparing to increase the Web site’s role as a medium for voice conversation. He says that GolfDiscount.com is considering a plan to use an IP telephony gateway to digitize and route calls from customers to agents who use CosmoCall.
The above excerpt is from the article "Surfing The Net For Live Agents: Cutting Edge Web Applications - Web Sites That Drive Customers to Call Centers " which appears in the December 1998 issue of Call Center Magazine.