Holidays are known for the merriest time of the year, but for a retailer, it is also the busiest. Most Retail businesses like to hire telecommunication call centers over the holiday season, but for more specialized services, retail call centers are mostly preferred. It is the period when a huge influx of customer enquiries might pop in suddenly over various channels, be it phone, email, chat or social media. And if you aren’t prepared, you could lose customers. A call center can help keep your business running seamlessly over the holiday period.

According to National Retail Foundation a confounding 20 to 40 percent of the annual sales for retail businesses take place between the last three months of the year. Besides, stats from LiveChat found out that retail online sites get 63 percent more visits on an average during this time of the year. Thus, it is crucial for retail brands to amplify their customer service, order taking service and chat support before the rush begins.  

How to ensure telecommunication call centers outsourcing is the right step?

Running a retail company requires you to know a little about everything and certainly doing a lot of everything. But are there tasks that keep your most in-house staff occupied? Should you delegate some of the non-core but essential functions to a third party? That’s where outbound call center services or inbound call center services can come in handy.

Regardless of how efficient your existing your internal teams, it is unlikely that your company will have adequate resources ready just around Christmas or New Year to handle the customer service demands, lead generation services, help desk solutions, order taking and tracking services, 24/7 live chat support and a whole host of other functions that are included under BPO services.  

The first step in ensuring if telecommunication call centers outsourcing is the right decision for your business is to figure out what tasks are the most crucial at this time. As the decision maker, it is assumed that you know best what functions need extra support and what responsibilities can be delegated to retail call centers. Consider outsourcing services that are typically passed on like BPO non voice process for chat and email support, outbound and inbound call center services, functions that are cost-efficient to outsource and those that are monotonous.    

Knowing the ins and outs of your retail business will help you make sure that the telecommunication call centers you partner with are capable of meeting your business requirements.

 How can BPO services be useful for retail business?

If you haven’t outsourced your customer service and other BPO services, at present, it’s high time you consider it. Some of the facts that might help you take a decision:

• Bigger demands in the period of holiday season results in dropped answering time for agents. Usually it takes 10 seconds to reply, and during the period of November and December, it exceeds 1.5 minutes (Source: LiveChat).
  
• Your retail business might require up to 77 percent extra workforces to handle your customer service (Source: LiveChat).    

Hiring contractual in-house staff is time-consuming, unproductive and expensive. Instead, look forward to inbound call center services to take care of customer requests in a timely manner. With customer experience playing a crucial role today in winning customers and their loyalty, hiring BPO voice process agents for phone support and BPO non-voice process agents for chat support and email support can be beneficial.   

 By outsourcing retail customer service, you will be capable of accessing specialized industry skills, latest technology, innovative CX-centric tools and experienced professionals instantly. This is something you don’t get if you rely solely on in-house teams.

Take a look at some of the ways in which outsourced telecommunication call centers like Fusion will help improve your retail business this festive season:

• Scaling up instantly for the holiday season
  Scaling up the resources just when you require and scale down when you don’t is one of the biggest perks of BPO services. Scaling up your in-house workforce can cost you an arm and a leg. You not only have to source the right candidates in the right position, but also have to pay them fair wage, set up additional infrastructure and cut everything down once the holiday rush is over.
  
  An outsourced provider can offer scalable solutions for lead generation services, customer service, pre and post sales support, claim management, email services and back office. This will ensure your customer expectations are always met while progressing your overall business.
  
• Improved vendor-retailer coordination
  Retailers don’t just have to excel at B2C services; there is a part – Vendor relationship management, where retailers need B2B skills as well. Having close vendor partnerships is critical for excellent retail performance, as suppliers are required to supply a steady flow of products to retailers for selling. With two-way planning, both vendor as well as retailer will predict revenue they are going to generate, profit maximization. However, during the busy period, vendor relationship management gets overlooked. B2B call centers outsourcing for retail ensures that it is well taken care of.    
  
• Encourage customers to self-serve
  Customers today are more self-sufficient and like to help themselves. So, retailers can save a considerable chunk of service time and resources by simply directing customers towards self-service. Many telecommunication call centers provide Omnichannel self-service solutions to let customers solve their problems by themselves. This frees up time for more complex customer queries.
  
• Access to first-rate technologies
  Implementing ground-breaking technologies into your retail in-house team will require IT assistance, software integrations and series of troubleshooting before you get used to it. It can be expensive and investing in non-core functions during holidays is not a great idea. However, some technologies can really be life savers like the Work at Home solution, especially during crisis-led holiday periods. With an outsourced call center you get work at home solutions, chatbot services and a range of automation solutions that reduce changes of human error, promote efficiency and productivity when working remotely.
  
• Highly-trained agents who represents your brand
  Top telecommunication call centers are compliant with PCI DSS, GDPR and other regulations that add credibility to your brand. They have highly qualified, specialized professionals who focus on growth, success and improvement of your business. From helping you with GDPR compliant lead generation services to gaining customer trust with PCI DSS compliance for data security, call center outsourcing can bring your business under the good light.

Why Choose Fusion?

 Retail call center services at Fusion are meant to help your business grow at a rapid pace and meet ever-changing customer expectations always. Agents perform a series of functions under voice and non voice processes as per your requirements. Our global delivery model, multilingual and multichannel support, added data security and scalability makes us an ideal partner for retail companies. To outsource your retail services, contact us now!  

Also Read : 6 Ways To Provide The Elderly Customers With Quality Customer Experience

The post How Can Telecommunication Call Centers Help With Retail Holiday Season first appeared on Fusion BPO Services Blog.