How to Increase Ecommerce Revenue With a Contact Center
Ecommerce is advancing at breakneck speeds, and businesses are jumping on any chance to increase ecommerce profits. In less strategic instances, profit-seeking companies will cut costs in development or find shortcuts in fulfillment. However, these kinds of maneuvers are not designed to sustain companies for the long term. Instead, smart companies identify long-term value and customer retention as the best ways to increase ecommerce revenue, and have repositioned their operations to focus on optimizing these metrics.
Chief among the drivers of retention-based growth is the quality and consistency of your support team. Within each service rep, or support hero as we like to call them, lies the ability to develop and enhance customer relationships to drive those essential long-term value statistics that your business needs to stay competitive and profitable.
By leveraging your customer contact center in a few key ways, you can unleash your ability to expand business operations and increase your ecommerce revenue.
Transitioning From Cost to Revenue Center
The sentiment surrounding contact centers has evolved tremendously in recent years. Long gone are the days when these vital services were viewed as cost centers. Instead, attitudes have shifted as ecommerce has matured. Now, customer acquisition is seen as a drain, and building lasting relationships is considered the key to breaking the cycle.
Managing change in operations within an individual contact center is essential to making this transition. Contact center leaders must recreate the culture and infuse support hero training with revenue-driving methodologies. This includes making processes more efficient for heroes wherever possible, providing heroes with information on customers in an accessible format, and pushing for upselling and cross-selling opportunities wherever applicable.
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Tactics to Grow Ecommerce Revenue
When you’re refocusing the role of your customer support team, each new action or effort should intentionally lean into revenue-driving factors. Too many support teams are simply treading water to be able to address and respond to an overwhelming amount of customer requests. The fundamental nature of the work needs to reflect a revenue-driving attitude and proliferate throughout the organization.
To start, support heroes spend far too much time doing research, backtracking, and gathering information on real-time customer requests. To ratchet up their productivity and let them turnover requests with greater speed, their organizations need to provide them with a program like ours that collates shopper portfolios and makes them easily available at a moment’s notice. If the conversation leads to it, heroes would also have the ability to accept payments and close sales directly within the context of their support.
On a deeper level, the right support center technology like Gladly empowers heroes to truly know their customers, creating a radically personalized experience that isn’t just ticket after ticket. These programs paint a crystal clear picture of who these shoppers are, how and what they shop for, and their potential for greater long-term value. This provides the basis for developing ongoing conversations that can easily drive revenue while also enabling tools like People Match which connects customers with reps based on their interests and needs.
Customers should also feel more adequately equipped to solve issues on their own. Preempting a large volume of requests makes a shopper’s life easier and takes a lot off of your heroes’ plates. This creates consistent support for the customer without overwhelming your reps.
Leading With Metrics to Grow Ecommerce Revenue
Increasing your ecommerce revenue through your contact center doesn’t happen by chance. Emphasizing key metrics and understanding how to optimize them makes all the difference in empowering your support heroes.
The simple fact remains that new customer acquisition, while always important, is costly compared to more sustainable efforts in retention and long-term value. Empowering support, above all else, is an enormous driver not just in retaining customers but also in referrals.
Customer Sentiment Helps Grow Ecommerce Revenue
According to our Customer Expectations Report, 63% of customers fall in love with brands precisely for great service, while 62% will recommend a brand based on great service. On the flip side, 45% of customers churn or stop buying after just two bad experiences.
These growth areas are not confined to any specific size or maturation level of business. In fact, smaller and more agile companies might be even more equipped to jump on retention metrics early, as their still-developing customer support teams are ripe for a low-risk, high-reward opportunity to invest in technology and staffing that leans into these beliefs.
As your business continues to grow beyond its infancy stage, one of your major ongoing conversations will be about redefining your approach to increasing ecommerce revenue. Ecommerce businesses can only drive pure sales and customer acquisition so much. Knowing how to increase your ecommerce revenue by leaning on the strength of a well-trained and optimized support team will help you achieve far greater growth at scale. Through a customer retention-led strategy, revenues can expand and diversify in ways that turn your business into a beloved brand.
Resources to Help Increase Ecommerce Revenue
For more tips and strategies on how to increase ecommerce profits, check out the following:
- Unpacking the Impact of Customer Experience on Revenue
- Customer Service Quality Assurance Checklist for Support Teams
- 3 Long-Term Strategies to Grow Shopify Revenue
- Making Service Your Business — A CX Leader’s Guide
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