Festive Season Sale: How e-commerce companies are giving customers a better shopping experience

Festive Season Sale: With several companies in competition, ensuring the best possible customer service has become no less than a requisite for survival.

Many e-commerce companies are adopting cloud to manage their business calls. (Image: AFP)

Festive Season Sale: Lately, the business industry has witnessed a significant growth in the e-commerce sector. The increasing number of online startups is notable and the growth rate of big online brands too has been phenomenal. With several companies in competition, ensuring the best possible customer service has become no less than a requisite for survival. Herein cloud telephony has emerged as an effective way to help e-commerce businesses take a step forward. Many e-commerce companies are adopting cloud to manage their business calls. This is essential because calling experience is a major component of customer service which should be taken care of. It becomes even more crucial during festive seasons wherein businesses get high number of orders which results in an increase in call volume too. Limited business contact numbers make it difficult to attend all calls, hence they end up missing quite a volume of customer calls. This is why most businesses opt for virtual business numbers rather than conventional ones. As the virtual number has multiple numbers mapped behind it, this allows the team to attend multiple calls simultaneously. It therefore, facilitates businesses to handle any volume of calls effectively and easily. Another realised advantage of using cloud telephony in e-commerce is that how it helps provide personalised customer engagement. Most e-commerce companies integrate their call management system with a CRM. This helps agents get access to all the related details of the caller on a single window, eliminating the need to recollect their information on every call. This eases the work for agents as well as provides a personalized customer experience. A smooth and faster on-call resolution is another requisite for a fine calling experience. This has become achievable with an IVR system. Businesses use it to facilitate their callers to connect with the concerned department directly, be it for issues related to order, delivery or refund. This makes the resolution process much easier and even removes the manual need to transfer calls from one department to another. Festive season even calls for heavy promotional activities. Businesses invest in several marketing campaigns and with different virtual numbers assigned to different platforms they are able to check the performance easily. The source of incoming calls is tracked which gives an insight into which campaign is bringing maximal customer calls. This makes future marketing investments much strategised and worthy for e-commerce business. Also, as cloud telephony solutions give a complete database of callers (potential customers), e-commerce companies even use it for remarketing purpose. People who connect with the business number are worthy prospects and remarketing on that database, be it through SMS or display ads proves beneficial for most businesses. From big brands like Snapdeal, Lenskart to e-commerce startups, cloud telephony has indeed proved effective for the particular niche. Considering the high competition, business survival has become difficult without providing top-notch service. Companies look for a solution that is affordable, automated and reliable to take their customer service one level up. Here, cloud telephony has certainly checked all the three boxes. The author of this article is the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of MyOperator.