Contact centers enable retail businesses to give the most efficient customer support. This customer support helps increase customer retention regardless of the business or customer’s location.
Nevertheless, retail call centers tend to have a unique set of issues that call centers in other industries do not face. Fortunately, there are simple solutions that can help you best manage your retail contact center workforce.
Contact Center Challenges and Pitfalls Retail Contact Centers Face
From time to time, retail contact centers can face some challenges that end up costing money, time, or customer service quality. These challenges are usually:
- Consumers Expect Continuous Service
- Keeping Up With Emerging Communication Channels
- Making Sense of Data
- Call Management
- Payment Options
- High Agent Turnover Rates
- Tackling Peak Seasons
- Multi-Location Management
Read on to discover how to overcome these pitfalls to make sure your call center is offering the best retail call center services.
1. Consumers Expect Continuous Service
Every retail call center job description includes one major component—responding to customer queries. And, considering that nowadays consumers are used to getting 24/7 services from e-commerce businesses, they will expect the same continuity from your retail business as well.
However, this can be tricky for most retail businesses out there because, unlike your store for which you have “working hours,” your call center has to be available to customers all day and all night. And when you have agents working for you around the clock, that means more and more operational costs for your call center.
Solution
Deploy virtual agents! These agents can not only be deployed to both voice and chat channels but also can work wonders for your retail call center in numerous ways. For example, they can:
- serve your customers after your agents complete their shift—now you’re a 24/7 operating call center with 77% less costs,
- provide your customers with self-service processes even during business hours—say goodbye to long AHT and low service levels, and
- automate repetitive tasks like order tracking—more time for your agents to focus on value-added tasks.
Plus, with cutting-edge contact center AI technologies like Dialogflow Voicebots and Chatbots, you do not have to compromise either the quality or efficiency of your customer interactions.
2. Keeping Up With Emerging Communication Channels
Today, every retail business has to have a presence in all possible consumer communication channels, that is, of course, if they want to gain a competitive advantage.
However, having such a presence can be much time-consuming and hard to manage, especially if you do not have the necessary resources to handle it.
Solution
One of the most important things you need to overcome this challenge is a multichannel call center solution. With such a solution, you would be able to cultivate customer interactions across all desired channels.
Call Center Studio has an open API library that comes with over 50 built-in integrations. The best part is, you can manage all these integrations on a single dashboard, leading to the most streamlined multichannel communication.
3. Making Sense of Data
In the era of data, obtaining information on agent performance, sales rates, frequent inquiries, and consumer behavior is as crucial as workforce management for retail contact centers.
This information is beneficial because it helps improve your operations by every means necessary. For instance, you can train your agents based on a specific dataset that displays their performance, while you can use another set of data that shows consumer behavior to upsell or cross-sell.
However, making sense of data is a job on its own that requires many resources and which is time-consuming.
Solution
If you were to pick only one feature for your call center solution, it should definitely be robust reporting and monitoring capabilities. With such tools, you would be able to make sense of all the data you retrieve and improve your operations to make sure your retail call center is nailing it.
Call Center Studio is the world’s first CCaaS built directly on Google, giving you access to one of the best data solutions out there—Google Data Studio.
Contact us to learn more about the Google perks you get to experience with Call Center Studio.
4. Call Management
One of the most experienced retail call center problems is call management and the ability to switch between outbound and inbound operations—mostly due to the fact that most call center solutions make it very hard to do so.
Solution
Deploy a call center solution that supports activating a user for both inbound and outbound operations and harnesses the power of blended operations.
Call Center Studio allows agents to switch between outbound and inbound calls with just a single click, enabling you to utilize your agents according to your operational needs.
5. Payment Options
Especially after the pandemic, consumers have favored different payment options. However, the fact that you’re a retail business and that you most likely don’t sell your goods online does not mean you can’t sell them via your call center!
Solution
A Virtual POS that you can easily integrate into your IVR system will help your customers buy your products over the phone—no websites or heavy deployments required!
From Virtual POSs to other numerous BI tools, check out Call Center Studio’s Retail Solution to discover how you can best manage your operations.
6. High Agent Turnover Rates
To be honest, this is a challenge for all call center operations out there, regardless of their industry. However, when you have to deal with high attrition rates in a retail call center, there is much more at stake due to the nature of your operations.
Solution
From poor leadership to burnout, there are many reasons that you may be experiencing high turnover rates. To get to the bottom of it, check out the 5 reasons for call center turnover and what to do about it?
7. Tackling Peak Seasons
Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Valentine’s Day… During these busy time periods, contact centers in the retail industry must either lower quality standards to keep up with demand or hire additional employees that are not needed for the vast majority of the year.
Solution
To keep up with the fluctuating amount of customer queries without compromising service quality or leading to agent burnout, you must ensure that you have just the right amount of agents to address the peak. Need some more tips? Read our blog to learn how to get ready for the high season.
Call Center Studio offers on-demand scalability with a pay-as-you-go model—allowing you to upsize your operations as you wish and downsize to your original scale whenever you want. The best part is, you only pay for the number of days those users were active.
Book a demo today to see how easy it is to scale your operations.
8. Multi-Location Management
You may have 5 different stores located across the entire tri-state area with only one call center, which is the case for almost every retail business we know.
At that point, you need to be able to extract location-based information on calls, customer queries, and so on.
Solution
Make sure to use a call center solution that provides you with location-based authority. By doing so, you would be able to track location-based inventory, customer information, and many more, which will help you run more targeted operations.
Hundreds of our international clients are leveraging our multi-location management feature. Read our success stories to discover how.
Why Should You Use a Cloud Contact Center Solution for Retail?
Alongside the previously mentioned solutions that a cloud call center solution will provide to retail call center problems, deploying a cloud contact center solution will provide you with:
- Flexibility
- Remote working capabilities
- Better workforce management
- Cost-efficiency (77% of costs saved)
- Newer call center technologies
Conclusion
Like with every business, retail call centers have their own problems—but nothing that can’t be solved with a proper call center solution.
Book a demo today to see how Call Center Studio can help you elevate your operations.
