8 mins read
Last few years have seen a massive paradigm shift in customer’s buying behaviour pattern, inclination towards online shopping has surprisingly undergone a huge switch.
The boost in e-commerce sales can be clearly seen in the research by Statista, which forecasts a steep growth of e-commerce sales to total retail sales, from 1.7 per cent in 2015 to expected growth of 4.4 per cent by 2019.
Moreover, as per Indian Brand Equity Foundation(IBEF) latest analysis,
The Indian e-commerce industry has been on an upward growth and is expected to surpass the US to become the second largest e-commerce market in the world by 2034.
With such startling statistics, there is no denying to the fact that e-commerce game is all set to get revolutionised. However, to increase the already flowing profits, all e-commerce companies have now aligned their business strategies in the direction of customers.
As e-commerce is a virtual platform, building trust in customers automatically becomes a major area of concern. The only solution to build this virtual trust is —Communication. Remaining in constant touch with your customers provides a sense of trust, showing that you care, and are always virtually present to hear and resolve their issues.
The more your customer trusts your word; the more are the chances of not only using your service but promoting as well through word of mouth.
Now, how to build trust among your customers through on a virtual platform?
Well, the term “Cloud Telephony” is the simple answer to this question.
Wondering what it is?
Cloud Telephony in Simple Terms
Cloud Telephony is a technology which has shifted the traditional telephony infrastructure to a virtual space.
Now, as a business owner, you don’t need to invest money in assembling the physical setup or hiring dedicated staff to handle the business communication.
A cloud telephony service provider handles all the infrastructural setup for you. The service provider hosts the telephony framework over the cloud and makes it accessible to your business on a minimal cost with the help of a web portal.
Features such as bulk SMS, toll-free numbers, call monitoring, quick number portability, and many others, have added value to the whole communication process.
Let’s dive deeper into how using these business telephony services is changing the customer experience game for the e-commerce industry.
1. Timely Response to Customer Queries and Complaints
Quality of your service is majorly defined by how prompt are you in resolving customer issues and complaints, and with the rise of customers in the e-commerce industry, it becomes all the way more important to address the customer’s query without delay.
Call routing and transfer service is a boon for e-commerce firms, ensuring that no call and customer remains unattended. In case of any unavailability of agents, the call automatically gets routed to the next available agent or transferred to their mobile numbers, whichever is best suited.
This smart call routing feature assures a timely response to all the customer, by acknowledging every customer query and complaint, without delay.
2. Keeps Your Customer Real-Time Updated of their Order
As e-commerce is a virtual platform, customers have always been sceptical of the transparency it provides.
To instil trust into customers, sending them constant updates of their shipment is the best way to remain transparent and trustworthy.
Cloud telephony service providers give the flexibility to track the whole shipment process with a real-time location tracker, keeping customers informed of every update in the process with SMS reminders.
The flexibility to handle customers in real-time helps you understand customer expectations by improving the overall credibility of your brand.
3. Automated Feedback System to Understand Customers Expectations
An e-commerce firm may receive a good turnout in quantity of customers, but assuring the service quality plays a major role in retaining the flowing numbers.
With cloud telephony, any e-commerce company can now send an automatically generated feedback to customers using IVR or broadcasting services.
Quick 2-3 menu-based feedback maximises the number of response without demanding a large time investment from the customers.
4. Personalised Customer Experience with IVR and Auto-Receptionist
Nowadays, e-commerce business communicates with the customers majorly through call or online portal, so it becomes vital for the businesses to make this communication personalised and welcoming, in order to align with customer’s emotional frequency.
As it is the best chance to make a good impression on the customers’ mind, you need to make sure that customers are not left confused once they approach you.
Using IVR streamlines your customer experience by guiding the customers systematically through the menu options.
Apart from being an auto-receptionist to all customer calls, it is also the first point of query resolution for the customers. It personalises the whole customer experience from attending the call in a customised tone to guiding the callers with an intelligently defined routing system.
Across other industries such as health, education, and finance, IVR has already proven to improve the engagement, productivity, and efficiency of the calling agents drastically.
5. Easy Scalability of Communication System
Business is ever-evolving, it grows and shrinks as per customer trends and needs, so, to keep up with this change, an e-commerce business needs a scalable communication system.
During festivals or other seasonal periods, the need for communication resources tremendously increases in the e-commerce industry.
The cloud telephony providers could easily handle this on-demand scaling. You need to communicate your scaling request with the service providers simply, and it gets done in a matter of a few minutes.
Flexibility to adjust your business needs and expenses make cloud telephony a very promising option for the e-commerce business.
6. Quick Data Recovery to Protect Any Business Loss
In the e-commerce industry, a business can never go offline; customers now want instant access round the clock. So, no business can afford to compromise on the business continuity and availability. Cloud undoubtedly proves to be the best solution to any technical disaster recovery.
Let’s presume your wired telephony system experiences a major technical issue and goes down, which means no customer can now approach you until the time your communication system is up and running.
This unpredictability easily gets washed away with cloud telephony system, as soon as any server faces a technical glitch, the backup server is immediately put into action to keep your communication system working.
The cloud has already proved to be the best disaster recovery mechanism throughout all industries, saving a huge business loss beforehand.
7. In-depth Data Analysis for Smart Business Decisions
As the famous saying goes,
Change is the Only Constant
This statement holds true for the businesses as well.
E-commerce is one such industry which constantly remains in touch with the customer’s needs, so understanding customers and their varying behaviour patterns become crucial to this industry’s sustenance.
Number of incoming calls, queries, call-resolution time, outbound feedback calls, and many such metrics help bring the right data onto the table for big decision making.
If you are a large e-commerce firm with millions of data, then integrating your cloud telephony system and its data with big data analytics is sure to yield some great customer behaviour insights.
8. Online Fraud Detection via Auto-generated Calls
Online fraud has been one of the biggest threat to the online business industry. Identity theft and card fraud continue to be the biggest hampering areas of the e-commerce industry.
According to a report, an estimated loss of $21.84 billion was caused by payment card frauds globally in 2015.
Cloud telephony companies have joined hands with the e-commerce industry in fighting against the fraudulent orders.
Sensing any fraudulent activity in the form of costly orders or repeated failed transaction attempts, e-commerce companies now send an auto-generated order verification call to the customers before finalising.
This attempt by cloud telephony industry to save companies from online thefts has safeguarded e-commerce and its customer’s services.
9. Bulk SMS Service to Broadcast Promotional Offers
SMS is undeniably an impressive platform for customer engagement especially for the e-commerce industry whose customer base is dominated by smartphone glued millennials.
E-commerce industry collaborated with cloud telephony to leverage this power of text messages.
The bulk SMS service provided by cloud telephony vendor steps up the game of promotion for the e-commerce companies, as now companies could send their promotional offers to a large number of customers in one go with a minimal investment.
Collaborating Digital Powers
On one side, e-commerce has reshaped the customers buying behaviour, and on the other side cloud telephony is bridging the trust gap between e-commerce and customers, smoothening the whole process from placing an order to post-delivery services,
This powerful collaboration of both the platform is creating a superior customer experience thereby changing the game of both the industries by making the customers’ buying experience effortless.
