Have you seen The Customer Experience Factbook?

In this 180+ page report, you'll find all the information and support you need to build a profitable, effective CX Improvement Program that spans every part of your business. You'll be able to implement and manage meaningful and profitable change, and grow your bottom line despite a slowing economy.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

Retailers face a nightmare before Christmas

The firm has warned that companies failing to ensure their customer service can cope at the most important trading time of the year could miss out on the opportunity to increase their sales by perhaps 5% or more.

Leading up to the festive season, contact centres tend to be inundated with customer enquiries, often involving large numbers of questions about the same topics. This increasing volume of routine, frequently asked questions (FAQs) can quickly lead to poor or slow service, resulting in heightened customer frustration and lost sales at a time that represents up to 50% of a retailers' annual revenue.

Research conducte using Eptica's customer base has shown that by reducing seasonal inbound FAQs and more efficiently responding to customers' enquiries at peak times, retailers can increase sales by an average of 5%.

According to Dee Roche, European marketing director for Eptica, "We looked at before and after scenarios at 280 organisations across a wide range of sectors and found a similar uplift in sales. This can be achieved by businesses using increases in efficiency as an opportunity to redeploy customer service resources to sales conversion activity and on delivering high quality service and advice to help potential purchasers. These benefits can only be realised by diverting low value questions away from customer service agents."

The company found that retailers can experience four times their normal level of customer enquiries in the build-up to Christmas, including more than twice the normal volume of inbound emails. For contact centres that handle thousands of calls and emails a day, this represents a significant volume of customer enquiries. For example, a contact centre receiving only 500 calls and 750 emails a month could easily see that number increase to 2,000 calls and 1,500 emails.

But, without the right systems in place it is difficult - if not impossible - to quickly identify which enquiries are potential sales and which are basic FAQs so that they can be filtered, prioritised and handled accordingly (or even handled automatically where possible).

The challenge for retailers, Roche suggested, is simply to ensure that enquiries that could result in a sale, if handled promptly, aren't lost because agents are tied up dealing with more basic questions.

With consumers starting their Christmas shopping months in advance the increase in customer enquiries for retailers can gain momentum as early as September. The spike that this creates in customer service continues to build throughout the January sales season, well into the end of February. Retailers continue to face a high volume of post-Christmas enquiries as customers contact them about issues such as gift returns and product support.

One company in Eptica's study was able to cut the number of inbound contacts it received from 6,000 to 3,000 during a peak customer service month while at the same time increasing its sales (compared to the same period the previous year). The same company also achieved a reduction in the cost of handling each contact from 6.50 to 1.70, resulting in a customer service saving of nearly 34,000 in a single month. This was achieved by migrating routine questions online using Eptica'snatural language self-service and email response software.

Have you seen The Customer Experience Factbook?

In this 180+ page report, you'll find all the information and support you need to build a profitable, effective CX Improvement Program that spans every part of your business.

You'll be able to implement and manage meaningful and profitable change, and grow your bottom line despite a slowing economy. Grab this goldmine of easily adaptable and up-to-date strategies, walk-throughs, trends, technologies, research, suppliers and partners, plus all the supporting arguments you need to build a solid CX strategy.

While most marketers could list maybe a dozen key points for improving their brand's Customer Experience (CX), the researchers and writers at The Marketing Factbook have identified FORTY main 'CX Keys' which will help you drive your customers to new levels of delight, loyalty, advocacy and profitability.

The areas in which customers have direct contact with your organization are perhaps the most obvious places in which CX improvements can be made, and this report addresses all 24 of these 'Direct CX Keys', applicable to offline and online businesses alike.

At the same time there are many other areas that indirectly affect CX (such as the supply chain, policies and processes) in which every business can make simple but far-reaching improvements. This report guides you through the problems and solutions for all 16 of these 'Indirect CX Keys', many of which are often forgotten or under-played even in the best CX strategies.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)