Ecommerce business is presently one of the largest business sectors in the world by the sheer number of customers. Quite evidently, such a surge in demand, especially during the Coronavirus pandemic, builds up the requirement for large volumes of business process outsourcing.
Outsourcing e-commerce customer support is extremely common. In fact, even startup e-commerce businesses and marketplaces consider outsourcing their customer service process so that they can focus on their core business operations. This high demand brings the dire need for every call center services provider for the e-commerce industry to scale up their service offerings.
With this being the perfect build-up to the importance of BPO for the e-commerce industry, let’s get going into talking more about the various processes and operations that can be outsourced.
A Few Statistics on E-commerce Business
- With physical retail businesses closing down due to the global Coronavirus pandemic, the demand shifted to the e-commerce sector. This triggered a surge in global sales by up to 6% in 2020.
- The number of top inbound call centers in the United States grew in 2020 due to the massive surge in online shopping trends. As a result, consumers spent over $861 billion in 2020.
- Back in 2011, the total share of e-commerce in retail was just 4.5%. However, this share grew to up to 14% in the third quarter of 2020. However, according to Digital Commerce 360, the e-commerce share for the retail sector in the United States accounted for an even better 21.3%.
These stats just prove how fast the demand for the e-commerce sector grew during the e-commerce sector.
E-commerce Operations that Can Be Outsourced
Given the high demands, major established e-commerce companies and marketplaces consider outsourcing more of their operations to streamline the business without investing a lot of capital and resources. As of 2021, almost all of the business operations can be outsourceable, besides just outsourcing e-commerce customer support.
Let’s talk about the most important ones here.
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Listing and Catalog Management
Once the e-commerce business flourishes, it may become extremely difficult to manage all the products’ listing and cataloging. Take a small example to understand the volume of the workload. Myntra, a fashion e-commerce company is operational only in India. Yet, it lists over 200,000 products at once. Now, listing and cataloging all of these products can get very overwhelming.
This is where the call center services provider for the e-commerce industry comes into the picture. Outsourcing this process helps you optimize all the product listing, descriptions, categorizing, etc. These are done by expert data entry executives, developers and designers, and website optimization experts.
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Customer Fulfillment and Returns
The need to maintain customer fulfillment and returns is what brings the need for outsourcing e-commerce customer support. If you consider Amazon, the largest e-commerce marketplace in the world, you will notice that the brand has a select range of sellers that are approved as “Fulfilled By Amazon”.
Around 66% of the top 10,000 sellers on Amazon are on this FBA program. Under this program, Amazon itself manages the warehousing and shipping. Now, what’s interesting to know is the massive fleet of vehicles the e-commerce company has to manage to maintain the inventory of these sellers.
Amazon makes things easy for its top sellers, but if your business is standalone e-commerce, it might be difficult. This is where outsourcing customer fulfillment and returns come into the picture.
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Customer Service in Ecommerce Business
Customer service is the ultimate service for call center services provider for e-commerce industry. As much as 51% of the entire customer base will avoid doing business with a brand after just one bad experience. This statistic itself proves how important customer service management is for any e-commerce brand.
Offering high-quality customer service over multiple platforms is what customers enjoy. However, brands need to offer customers the flexibility they want when it comes to getting in touch with representatives.
Modern-day BPOs and call centers for e-commerce offer a multichannel customer service portfolio. This means the customer service is never restricts to on-call support only. The support platforms extend to social media, email support, live chats, and even text messages. The ease of contacting the brand through any preferred medium satisfies the customers most.
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Lead Generation
Lead generation is important, without a doubt. The entire marketing and sales department of e-commerce depends on the lead generation campaign. For proper and effective lead generation, any e-commerce brand needs a very strong network of marketing professionals.
One alternative is contacting a BPO company that can help you generate leads. However, there is an important catch to this. Considering the present-day customers’ demands and behavioral patterns, it is important to ensure that the lead generation campaign can spread across multiple platforms.
People use social media a lot these days. So, including the various social media platforms in the marketing campaigns can ensure better lead generation, eventually leading to higher sales figures.
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Complaint Handling
For any business sector with a massive customer base, complaint handling can be the major difference between success and failure. Keeping the same in mind, even the e-commerce industry requires the services of a BPO company with complaint handling.
Outsourcing e-commerce customer support to a BPO company can release a major burden off your shoulder, allowing you to focus more on the core ecommerce business operations and enhance the quality of your services. So, in a way, besides just streamlining the entire complaint handling process, BPO companies can do it with quality assurance and at a lower cost too.
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Customer Retention in Ecommerce Business
Customer retention is not a single process and requires strategies to take care of all the processes. Top BPO companies that can handle the e-commerce customer retention process implement various plans, like reputation management, survey, and feedback, reviews, etc.
Positive reviews and reputation, along with uncompromised customer service, ensure that your customer retention rate is at the highest.
The Wrap Up
The e-commerce sector, being a flourishing industry, is presently the biggest client for BPO. Moreover, it also has the most number of processes and operations that can be outsourced, out of which we have mentioned the most important and common ones.
Moreover, considering how technology is on a developing scale, it is evident that the quality-of-service offerings will increase. This will also inflate the number of operations that can be outsourced, leading to an enhancement in the overall buying experience for the customers.
