SELLBYTEL Spain: New Blog-Article on Transforming your Customer Service from a cost to a profit center

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SELLBYTEL Spain Business Manager Marta Lopez offers her Knowledge about changing a Cost Center into a Profit Center in a Blog Article.  Read the English translation below and read the original Text in Spanish here:

Transform your E-shop customer service from a cost center to a profit center (I)    

Many companies consider the customer service and users support as a cost. In case of E-commerce, these services are required by law because the procurement of services or the purchase of products online needs to offer different types of contact.

Well, it is possible to transform it from a cost center to a profit center.

To do this, the first point is to control all data that allow us to set the targets and assess their level of achievement:

1. Which is the current monthly cost of the customer service?
2. Which is the current and monthly sales amount?
3. Which is the volume of sales on absolute values and which is its relation with:

- Unique monthly visitors.
- Total of monthly visits.

4. Which is the monthly percentage of abandoned carts?
5. Which is the number of contacts monthly handled by the customer service?
6. Which is the sales conversion ratio of the handled contacts?
7. Which are the total and average amounts of all contacts that have generated a final sale?

Once these data are regularly monitored, we can implement changes in the customer service and watch the differences.

Note that if I have listed these control data is because a good customer service has a positive effect on each customer.

It is also important to take into account that improvements should be implemented once the market quality standards are consolidated and applied not only in online stores but also in any customer service. These goals are commonly called Service Levels or SLA (Service Level Agreement):

The most common are:

1. % of contacts handled before X time, usually during the following ranges: 80% -90% of received calls are handled within 20 or 30 seconds.
2. Maximum between 3% -5% of abandoned calls.
3. 80% of the emails are met before a certain time (in this case, there is no standard because customers’ profiles are very different). But the most common is that at least 80% of emails are handled within 24 hours.
4. In Chats: a maximum waiting-time is guaranteed before starting the Chat.
5. A maximum waiting-time is guaranteed to answer by Twitter or Facebook.
6. First contact resolution. The goal is usually achieved at 60%.

In the next two posts, I will propose concrete strategies to increase sales and avoid the abandonment of shopping carts.

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