– By Sheshgiri Kamath
According to a recent report by the Indian Retail Association, the festive season accounts for nearly 40% of annual e-commerce sales in India. With this influx of orders, festive sales in India exhibit a golden opportunity for ecommerce brands to elevate their customer experience, both before & after sales. It is the time to capitalise on cultivating new connections with their customers and improve upon the existing ones.
The unprecedented increase, while it brings a plethora of revenue generation opportunities, also creates customer interactions and places immense pressure on customer support teams to manage a flood of tickets. Predicting and managing the surge in customer queries is highly challenging, and most retailers & ECommerce brands are not equipped to handle it. Add to it the ever-persistent challenge of high agent churn rates & the need to constantly keep them trained to provide the best resolutions.
If you are a retailer looking to ride the festive wave, here are our top 5 picks of practitioner-approved technology tips you need to keep in mind to be prepared for this rush period:
1. Proactive and predictive planning
This period is bound to present your team with overwhelming spikes in customer support demands. This is where prediction engines come into play to accurately forecast incoming support loads which further allows brands to shift from a reactive to a proactive approach.
Contact centre leaders should analyse retrospective data, and leverage intuitive tools to forecast customer demands and trends. When embedded in the CX automation platform, this predictive capability enables them to anticipate and handle surges in customer queries, strategically allocating their resources and teams. As a result, ecommerce brands can maintain high levels of customer satisfaction, even during peak sales periods, by reducing wait times, preventing service bottlenecks, and delivering a seamless support experience when it matters most.
2. Intuitive platforms for efficient support
During festive sales, ecommerce brands need to equip themselves with swift and effective support to handle the surge in customer interactions. It is imperative to embed a solution that has an easy-to-use interface so that your agents have the right set of information handy to provide the best resolution to your customers, instead of spending time toggling between multiple screens or worse, with a tool that is very difficult to navigate. With an intuitive user interface, new-age CX platforms are designed to minimise the learning curve for customer support agents. This ease of use ensures that even new or temporary staff can quickly adapt, maintaining high service standards without extensive training.
Additionally, CX platforms with a shallow learning curve not only reduce onboarding time but also mitigate the risk of disruption due to staff turnover or increased seasonal hiring. With this, ecommerce brands can bring more effectiveness to operational teams from day one.
3. Investing in customer self-serve capabilities
Festive sales drive massive traffic to ecommerce brands’ websites and social media handles and addressing each customer’s query across multiple channels becomes extremely challenging. As a result, it becomes significant for these brands to invest in good self-serve technology to increase the efficiency of their customer support team by offering multilingual and consistent support throughout the customer journey.
With the right integrations and optimised chatbots, brands can offer quick and accurate responses. It is the perfect time to explore advanced self-serve options so brands can offer a smoother shopping experience. This not only enhances customer satisfaction but also frees up support teams to focus on more complex issues, ensuring the agility and responsiveness of the brand during peak sales periods. Kapture Self-serve 2.0, for instance, has helped their customers deflect upto 90% of the tickets and improve CSAT to drive higher retention.
A crucial thing to keep in mind when designing self-serve experiences for customers is to ensure that it is personalised to their needs and their specific industry. Thus, another key thing to consider when choosing a solution to help you with self-serve is to ensure they are made to cater to your industry and are AI-powered to be able to provide customised and personalised resolutions.
4. Optimise agents’ workspace from day 1
During peak sales, customer teams get under immense pressure to deliver timely responses. Integrate a CX platform that can alleviate the stress of support agents and free them up to handle more critical queries. New-age CX platforms powered by LLM and Gen AI can act as a supportive ally, improving the efficiency of agents. This provides real-time assistance to customers so agents can resolve issues more quickly.
Ecommerce brands must equip their teams with the right tools, not only to improve customer satisfaction but also to ensure their agents remain focused and motivated, even during the busiest sales periods.
5. Deep insights into quality
While automating and managing customer queries in bulk, don’t lose sight of quality resolutions. Ecommerce brands can equip their teams with robust analytics and insights in maintaining a clear view of customer feedback and real-time operations. This ensures that the quality of resolutions is not compromised amidst high volumes.
By continuously analysing performance data, brands can monitor how efficiently issues are being resolved and gauge customer sentiment surrounding these resolutions. Striking the right balance between quality and volume is crucial and brands must ensure that resolutions are not only timely but also meet customer expectations.
Bottomline
India is known for its long festive season that presents both opportunities and challenges, especially for ecommerce and retail brands. Integration of CX platforms has helped them maintain customer satisfaction and operational efficiency. However, brands need to be diligent in investing in a CX platform to make sure that it is predictive, streamlines onboarding and is equipped with self-serve tools. This will ensure ecommerce brands can turn the festive season’s challenges into opportunities, delivering seamless, responsive, and personalised customer experiences that drive loyalty and long-term success.
(Sheshgiri Kamath is the CEO and Co-Founder of Kapture CX.)
(Disclaimer: Views expressed are personal and do not reflect the official position or policy of Financial Express Online. Reproducing this content without permission is prohibited.)