E-Commerce Answering Service
The E-Commerce Answering Service has become increasingly important as E-commerce has become more complicated. It is no longer good enough for the online merchant to put up a simple E-commerce Web site. The customer asks lots of questions before buying. It is easier to have a skilled Customer Service Representative (CSR) answer all these questions than try to answer them on the Web site. Those CSRs, by definition, work at an E-commerce Answering Service. The Web site directs the user to the E-Commerce Answering Service when the customer isn’t ready to use the shopping cart, and the CSRs at the E-Commerce Answering Service help the customer make the buying decision.
Why an E-Commerce Answering Service?
The E-commerce merchant isn’t a mind reader: he knows quite a bit about what his customers want, he knows answers to the vast majority of their questions, but he doesn’t know all the questions they might ask. If you let the customer ask the questions via E-mail (“Contact Us”), you run the risk that she will lose interest and buy someone else’s product instead. Letting her ask those questions immediately, over the phone, to a living CSR, is the secret of the E-commerce Answering Service.
Do You Need Your Own E-Commerce Answering Service?
An E-commerce business must have an E-commerce Answering Service. The E-Commerce Answering Service can be part of your company or someone else’s. If you own the E-commerce answering service, you can certainly save on operating costs, but an E-Commerce Answering Service is expensive to set up. An E-Commerce Answering Service run by call-center professionals knows the problems in running an E-Commerce Answering Service better than you do. Many of the problems you would run into while developing your own E-Commerce Answering Service (recruiting and training CSRs, script development, integration with your business) are common to every other E-commerce Answering Service. The E-Commerce Answering Service is dedicated to the principle that the customer wants answers NOW, not when you get around to answering them. So it’s not a question of whether to have an E-commerce Answering Service: it’s a question of who will run it – you or someone else. For a big enough company, it makes sense to have your own E-commerce Answering Service. (A big enough company can even provide an E-Commerce Answering Service to other companies.) Below a certain size, though, it makes more sense to hire an E-Commerce Answering Service to manage your own Web-based customer service.
Other Features of the E-commerce Answering Service
The E-Commerce Answering Service should not only answer customer calls, it should also track statistics about customer purchases – what promotions enticed them to the Web store, for instance. The E-Commerce Answering Service should also track the myriad details of purchases, from managing unclosed leads to integrating their shopping cart technology with your original Web site. Above all, the E-Commerce Answering Service should follow ever-faster changes in technology so the E-merchant doesn’t fall behind the competition.
