6 Reasons Why Retailers Should Embrace Contact Center Outsourcing

Every year, a larger percentage of retail business is conducted via the online marketplace. Well known as this fact is, it’s surprising how few companies have really embraced the full range of possibilities offered by online communications to give their customers a truly comprehensive and satisfying experience.

Shutterstock; Photo by Nicola Katie

Of course, doing so isn’t exactly child’s play. There are many factors to fully embracing the online marketplace, and it takes real expertise to identify and master them all. Most retailers have had an online shopping cart in place for decades, for instance. But how many have followed that up by providing comprehensive, 24/7 online customer support? And how many could, even if they wanted to?

Today more than ever before, ensuring growth and continued success means earning the loyalty of your customers. But offering a satisfying customer experience (CX) isn’t just a matter of offering one-click shopping on your website (or via a third party like Amazon). It also means giving people the means to satisfactorily interact with you via any communications channels they choose.

And every year, there seems to be more and more of these channels. If they really want to stay competitive, today’s retailers have little choice but to engage on each of them—for example, to provide support not only via their webpages, but also using automated chat, social media, SMS messaging, email marketing and many others. Even the more traditional channels, such as phone and voice, are now mostly delivered via online technology (VOIP, for instance).

This can be a real challenge, particularly for leaders whose success has come from their ability to focus on other aspects of business—like, say, retailing. Fortunately, though, those businesses now have the opportunity to not only meet but excel at this challenge, thanks to the rise of the on-demand contact center outsourcing.

Read more about What’s the difference between a call center and a contact center? And why does it matter?

6 Reasons for Retailers to Embrace Contact Center Outsourcing

Even without being driven by market necessities, contact center outsourcing can offer a rich variety of advantages to retailers, each of which can be a critical lever in ensuring continued growth and success. Here’s a rundown of the most striking of these benefits of contact center outsourcing.

1. Keeping Up with Technology
   • Maintaining a strong presence across all of today’s communications channels isn’t just logistically challenging, it’s downright expensive. Retailers that choose to maintain their own contact centers must purchase a good deal of sophisticated hardware, along with the software needed to make it all run. And it all needs to be updated regularly to ensure that it works as it should—and that it’s always equipped with the latest security safeguards, too. When you partner with an on-demand customer care service provider, you get instant access to an entire suite of cutting-edge tech infrastructure—without having to invest in it yourself.
2. Access to Expertise
   • Maintaining the latest hardware and software is one thing; having the experience and expertise to actually use it to its fullest potential is quite another. Contact center agents who are savvy with the latest technology, as well as skilled in the crucial arts of upselling and maintaining customer loyalty, are increasingly hard to find. (They also come at a premium price.) Partner with a seasoned and experienced on-demand CX provider and you’ll have access to a network of agents with real expertise in customer care—as well as IT personnel to make sure the technology keeps running smoothly and surely.
3. Specialized Support
   • The most effective customer care agents are experts not just in technology and customer care best practices, but they also know how to best apply your specific selling points to get the results you want. These are agents who can intuitively identify with customers to present your brand and services in the best light. Companies, such as Working Solutions, take pride in offering access to a roster of professional CX agents across the United States and Canada, each of whom is skilled in taking your specific talking points and applying them in a way that gets results and drives real growth for your business.
4. Geographical Dispersal
   • It’s difficult for all but the largest corporations to employ agents in sites across the continent. Yet failure to do so means susceptibility to regional disruptions from the social ( strikes or labor shortages) to the acts of nature (severe weather events or natural disasters). With a dedicated customer care partner, you’ll have access to a network of highly qualified agents who work from diverse locations throughout the United States and Canada. In the event that any one region is adversely affected, you can rest easy knowing that agents in other areas are ready to step in.
5. Seasonable Scalability
   • For retailers that choose to manage their own contact centers, scalability is a serious challenge. No matter what product or service you’re selling, the year is filled with peaks and valleys in customer activity. And for most businesses, it simply isn’t cost-effective to employ the same number of agents during the peak and off seasons. Yet failing to do so means risking being shorthanded or having to rely on (often unskilled) temporary help during your busiest times. In addition to helping you ensure business continuity in the face of adverse events, a distributed network of top-grade contact center agents gives you the option to instantly scale the amount of agents you need at any given time, either upward or downward, at a moment’s notice.
6. Omnichannel Integration
   • Today’s consumers are not only using more communications channels than ever before, but they’re also using these channels in a dizzying variety of combinations. A shopping experience might begin via an email message, for instance, then move to your website, and conclude with a phone call. True retail success means being in control of all stages of each customer journey—in other words, it requires an omnichannel strategy. An omnichannel strategy requires real expertise in data processing and strategic planning. A dedicated, outsourced contact center partner will offer all the analytical tools you need to make sure your customers experience the highest-level omnichannel experience, no matter what touchpoint they’re using at any given time.

It’s Time to Call in the Experts!

For these reasons (and quite a few others), many of today’s most successful retailers are choosing to outsource their contact center operations to dedicated, specialized service providers like Working Solutions. With more than 20 years of experience, we specialize in helping businesses meet the growing challenges of achieving positive growth in a highly competitive, wildly unpredictable online marketplace.