The following thought starters will arm you with the ideas necessary to sell the idea of social media customer care to your company’s decision makers.

Customer Care grounds social media in the most profitable phase of the social media purchase funnel.  This is a key differentiator between the marketing or public relations functions of social media, which only service the awareness / upper-funnel elements of the purchase process. The following infographic shows how all three elements are necessary to fully service social media – The Brand, The Agency, and The Brand Care Contact Center:

How the client, brand agency, and customer care center fit together to service consumers in social media.

Social Media Customer Care: Key Differentiators

• Customer Care Focus– Who better to service the customer at 60-70 engagements per agent per hour than a full-time, dedicated customer service representative?  These Brand Care Specialists can be specialized to both serve the inbound customer support needs of your brand pages, as well as proactively upsell and prospect for your brand with an outbound customer engagement mentality.
  
  Key Differentiator: Advertising agencies focus on big-splashes, missing the boat on individual customer care solutions, and lacking the staffing, infrastructure, and know-how to fully engage the customer in a sustainable manner.

• Brand Knowledge & Safety – At Global Response, we commit to learning, living, and breathing your brand.  All agent touch points fully represent your brand in the way that you want it represented.  Also, our internal team is structured with the requisite tools and processes to prevent on-page slipups that can damage brand credibility.
  
  Key Differentiator: Advertising agencies don’t perform the level of ongoing training needed to keep their interns up-to-speed on where your brand is headed.  Most agencies just throw more interns at the problem, with no more structure than a basic knowledge of Facebook – which can lead to service level problems on your pages.

• Optimization & Constant Contact – Global Response’s Brand Care teams establish best-practices and ongoing optimization processes for serving the customer, escalating problem issues to the proper party – client side – and keeping the dialogue going until a negative experience is turned into a brand evangelist.
  
  Key Differentiator:  Advertising agencies do not and cannot perform this constant optimization process to better serve your page.  The mentality for your presence is, “Set it and forget it” where all problem interactions are dumped on the client point of contact to sort out, without recommendations or proactive response.

• Man Power & Sustainability – Over time, internal social media management teams fall apart.  Key individuals either leave the company or are promoted to another role, and the knowledge gained with that team is lost.  With an outsourced contact center, those relationships are sustained year after year, consistently bringing the highest level of customer service to your customers with no down time or gaps.
  
  Key Differentiator:  Advertising agencies hire interns to act in this role – which means that their teams fall apart every semester and cannot be sustained.

• Efficiencies – By outsourcing your social media customer care to a contact center, you will be able to maximize the efficiency of your current agents, putting them to work and saving you money overall. If you have agents answering phones and chats, but still have 15 minutes remaining in a given hour, your agents’ downtime can be best used to monitor and engage on your social presences.
  
  Key Differentiator: Advertising agencies are not built for customer service; asking them to do so is like asking them to reinvent the wheel. It is unrealistic and inefficient for them to perform actions that they are not used to performing and staffing for needs that they are not used to staffing. Agent utilization isn’t even a concept that would cross a marketers mind.

For many businesses, the social media component is a critical element for their Contact center.  Since a customer care contact center is an extension of the brand, social media is an extension of the service.  It is one more form of interaction that today’s public recognizes.

Global Response helps clients listen to social media and respond promptly and professionally to customer support issues. For Contact centers, like many other businesses, it’s a new norm – but it will be considered traditional and standard as the marketplace continues to evolve.

ThinkGeek customers are techies who often ask questions that test a call center agent’s product knowledge. That’s one reason the company regularly sends its products to Global Response for agents to play with. “We make it a point to send the ones we get the most questions about,” says Brisbane Benedicto, Operations Specialist for ThinkGeek. “We’ve even designated a Global Response agent to be a Product Specialist for us. When other agents have questions, he will be the go-to guy because he’s a techie himself and a customer who already lives our brand.”

Having a Product Specialist also streamlines the escalation process. “If agents have a question the specialist can’t answer, he can contact the merchant, who can contact the vendor to get the answer,” says Benedicto. “He can take responsibility for coordinating the process and following through to make sure the customer gets a correct, timely answer.”

Returning to a U.S. Call Center

Before engaging Global Response, ThinkGeek was using an offshore call center. “Our customers tell us they love the fact that we’re back in the U.S. because they’re getting more complete and accurate product information,” says Rebecca Santiago, Operations Coordinator for ThinkGeek.

Santiago emphasizes that “many of our customers are repeat customers, who have been buying from us for years and years. Obviously, keeping them happy is really important.”

Serving a Connected Customer Base

ThinkGeek has a very connected customer base, which has a clear upside—they tell lots of people when they’re happy with products or service. “Recently a customer dedicated a blog post to the experience he had with us,” says Benedicto. “He had a problem with a product and the Global Response agent was quick to send a new one. The customer wrote a complimentary blog post about how happy he was with the service he received.”

That incident underlines the fact that for ThinkGeek, social media is a growing channel for delivering customer care. The company already has internal staff members with that assignment and may use Global Response to help out in the future.

Recent research has shown how important it is for online retailers like ThinkGeek to provide outstanding service to their connected customer base. The 2012 American Express® Global Customer Service Barometer found that consumers who have used social media for service wield the greatest amount of influence. They tell significantly more people about their service experiences, and say they’d spend 21 percent more with companies who deliver great service—compared to 13 percent on average.

About ThinkGeek

ThinkGeek is an online retailer that caters to computer enthusiasts and other “geeky” social groups. Merchandise includes clothing, electronic and scientific gadgets, unusual computer peripherals, office toys, pet toys, child toys, and caffeinated drinks and candy. ThinkGeek was founded in 1999, is based in Fairfax, Virginia, and is owned by Geeknet. A majority of products sold on ThinkGeek are heavily related to (and sometimes only understood within) Internet culture.

Justifying a Dedicated Group

A Global Response customer since 2009, Native Remedies has over 500,000 customers worldwide and offers more than 250 herbal and homeopathic remedies. Native Remedies started out using only shared agents, who did a great job with customer service.

But Marc Padernacht, Customer Service Manager for Native Remedies, says he soon came to believe that a dedicated group could do a better job selling the company’s many products. After the first six months with Global Response, he began moving his call center team towards an emphasis on dedicated agents, who primarily sell, but also handle some customer service inquiries.

“We struggled to train and develop shared agents, because they were taking minimal call volume on a daily basis from our customers,” says Padernacht. “We reasoned that we could build a core group of agents who would take the majority of calls, and turn them into true representatives of Native Remedies at Global Response. We started with two agents and built to five. As we added agents, and they became more and more familiar with our products, brand personality, and customers, we saw increases in our conversion rate, basket size, and overall revenue. With their ability to listen to the customer and use our website, they can sell our product as if they were sitting here in my office. We found that when you’re represented by agents who really understand who you are and what you offer, and they’re taking 85 to 90 percent of your calls, you get much better sales results than you would with a shared group.”

Balancing Cost vs. Results

With shared agents, clients pay by the minute; with dedicated agents, they pay by the hour. Dedicated agents, for this reason and others, are more like employees of the client company. However, a client needs a certain call volume to justify the added investment in dedicated agents. For that reason, the dedicated group for Native Remedies started out working five days a week from 9 to 5, then, as call volume and sales grew, expanded to add weekends.

But call center experts agree that clients get value for their investment. Dedicated agents typically have deeper brand and product knowledge, which helps make them more effective salespeople for a specific client. The dedicated agents for Native Remedies, for instance, have received extensive training and coaching, and some have been on the account for more than a year and a half. As a result, they know the company and its products well, and excel at selling. Native Remedies still uses shared agents at Global Response, but their primary responsibility is customer service.

Reaching 20 Percent Growth Targets

What results is the dedicated group delivering? “Over the past year, we’ve seen a 20 percent growth in overall revenue, year over year,” says Padernacht. “We attribute that largely to the sales skills of the dedicated group. The constant communication between the dedicated group and our own in-house experts, and the first-call resolution process we put in place also contribute. But the number one factor was building that dedicated group.”

Padernacht adds that the company’s marketing is geared to driving more calls to the call center, “because we know the more we do that, the higher our conversion rate and the bigger our baskets, as long as we have a dedicated team taking those calls. If we were to use a shared group, I’m not sure we’d be getting the same results.”

For Padernacht and Native Remedies, shared and dedicated agents are both valuable; the key to getting the best overall results is to play to the strengths of each. “A shared group is highly cost-effective and can do just as good a job on the customer service side, but for sales, cross-selling and upselling, a dedicated group, in our experience, delivers better results.”

So it makes business sense to have more salespeople to help the customers at your brick-and-mortar stores. But what if the store we’re talking about is a website? Does the same strategy of having more salespeople “on the floor” boost sales for online retailers?

Being There for Online Shoppers

In a brick-and-mortar store, when a shopper has a question or can’t find an item, she seeks out a salesperson. What happens when she can’t find one? According to The New Yorker article, “One of the biggest problems retailers have is what is called a ‘phantom stock-out.’ That’s when a product is in the store but can’t be found. Worker-friendly retailers with more employees have fewer phantom stock-outs, which leads to more sales.”

On an e-commerce website, what’s the equivalent of seeking out a salesperson? It’s contacting the e-tailer in one of several ways: via phone, live chat, click-to-call, email, or social media. To avoid phantom stock-outs and avoid having shoppers leave your site without buying anything, you need to be there when they seek your help. The way you do that is by having well-trained representatives who respond quickly and effectively to customer service requests from shoppers on your site.

More and more retailers are realizing just how critical such a customer service function is, both online and off. According to a new report from NRF and KPMG, nearly 67 percent of companies rank customer satisfaction as the top strategic initiative for 2012 and, similarly, 82 percent say customer service strategies will be their top priority in the coming year, up from 75 percent last year. Luxury brands in particular, who are seeking to differentiate themselves in a crowded online marketplace, understand that they can do so by providing a level of customer care that competitors don’t. What’s more, having a knowledgeable customer care representative available not only helps you make a sale on one specific occasion, it becomes part of an improved customer experience and fosters brand loyalty.

Staffing Your Online Customer Care Function

If you’re persuaded that highly available, knowledgeable salespeople can boost online sales, the next question is, How do you get them? You could hire and train a sufficient number of employees to staff an internal contact center capable of handling the volume of phone calls, chat requests, emails and social media posts that come your way. One advantage of such an internal staff is that you can ensure your agents are immersed in your brand and convey your brand personality with every customer interaction. But the downside relates to capital expense. Staffing your own internal call center involves expenses related to hiring and training, benefits, managers, office space, sophisticated telecommunications hardware and software, increased network bandwidth and more. All the money you spend for those items is money you can’t spend on your core business mission.

Yet cost savings is only one consideration in the decision, and, according to Kate Leggett, a senior analyst at global research and advisory firm Forrester, it shouldn’t be the main one. In her latest report, “Decide Whether To Build or Source Your Customer Service Operations: Profiles of Eight Leading Customer Service Outsourcing Vendors,” Leggett addresses the building/buying/outsourcing debate and advises not to outsource to save money. “[Cost] is the absolute wrong reason to outsource,” she says. Rather, outsource for consistency and standardization within voice, chat and e-mail channels, and to better serve your customers with a delineated response flow.

E-tailers with strong brands who do decide to outsource often find that the smart business decision is to engage a contact center that specializes in brand care. You still get the benefit of having agents who are experts in your brand, but you realize savings on the capital expense front. And you get the main benefit you were after all along: Increased sales that come from not abandoning customers shopping online—not to mention delivering a better overall customer experience that more closely replicates the in-store experience, fosters brand loyalty, and promises future sales from repeat customers.

But selecting a local call center to work with is just the beginning for an international retailer. Setting up operations and providing the necessary training for agents located abroad takes some extra planning. European-based retailers, for instance, should plan to send a representative to their new U.S.-based outsourced call center for several weeks to help hire and train agents to service customers according to the company’s brand culture. In addition, the U.S. call center should be prepared to have the manager responsible for the account travel to the retailer’s home office to absorb the company culture and see first-hand how the retailer takes orders, fulfills them, handles customer service issues, and more. If the retailer has stores in the U.S., the account manager can benefit from not only visiting them, but actually working in one for a week or more to get acquainted with the retailer’s customers, product line, merchandising strategy and store layout.

Integrating Systems for Better Service

Training agents on culture, products, and procedures is essential, but supporting them with the right technology can make the difference between good and outstanding service. By integrating the retailer’s OMS (order management system) or CRM (customer relationship management) software in the call center, agents are empowered with information and processes are standardized and simplified. For instance, when a “WIsMO” call (“where is my order?”) comes in from an existing customer, the agent should be able to quickly access the order detail and tracking information. For other customer service issues and questions, a comprehensive case management system to track, manage and escalate issues will shorten call times and improve first-call resolution (FCR).

Two-way communication between the retailer and the outsourced call center is key. Each company’s IT managers should talk, plan and execute the systems integration together. The call center’s IT manager needs to fully understand not only the retailer’s existing systems and platforms, but also the processes, strategies and goals behind the technology. By replicating these systems and processes on the call center floor, the outsourced contact center functions as an extension of the retailer’s enterprise.

How Global Response Does International

Global Response serves a range of established international retailers that are new to the U.S. market. As with any of our retailers, faithfully representing the brand is our highest priority. To do that, we need to train our U.S. agents on the brand, and we often start that process by sending one of our managers abroad for a for a multi-week stay at the retailer’s headquarters. While there, she immerses herself in the company culture—meeting marketers, listening to in-house agents handle customer service calls, and learning the company’s customer service policies. When she returns to the U.S., she may do a stint in one of the company’s stores, if they have any in the U.S. Working alongside regular employees helps her get to know the customer base and the company sales culture.

We usually recommend that the retailer send one of its customer service managers here for a multi-week stay, ideally to help interview, hire and train the Global Response agents who will work on the account. If possible, the hired agents, just like the account manager, should spend several days in the retailer’s store working with customers.

To keep in touch after the training period is over, some international retailers use videoconferencing for daily communication. Using this channel in addition to email or phone calls enables our agents to see body language, which helps communication when the two sides speak different languages.

An especially valuable role Global Response plays for its international retailers is that of being an advisor on U.S. business and retailing practices. We don’t assume that international retailers are familiar with the cultural aspects and practices around such U.S. retailing events as Black Friday or Cyber Monday. We act as their U.S. retail culture consultant, offering advice on buying habits, how best to boost sales, how to differentiate themselves from the competition and more.

A Smart Business Investment

Selecting and establishing a strong relationship with a U.S.-based call center requires extra work from both the international company and its domestic partner, but the benefits in terms of practical market knowledge, better communications with customers, and higher-quality service make it a smart business investment. As their partner and expert on U.S. customers, Global Response provides advice that helps our international retailers succeed here and optimize the value of their investment they’ve made in expanding their brand and operations into our market.

We recognize that upselling is not the right strategy for all brands in all situations. For some brands, not upselling or making additional offers when a customer calls is part of their personality. We have many clients who feel this way and we’ve heard from their customers that this approach is appreciated and strengthens brand loyalty.

If you’re already upselling or planning to, we can share some useful lessons we’ve learned from decades of experience upselling for clients in range of industries.

• Establish a baseline. Before you start an upsell program, run reports to establish your average order value, average items per order, average revenue per week, and any other key metrics you want to improve with the upsell program.
• Set realistic goals. If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there? Look at your baseline, then establish targets for key metrics so you can measure your progress in meeting them.
• Conduct training your way. It’s important to train the agents who will be doing the upselling. Some clients do the training themselves, others ask us to do it, and often we collaborate on it. However it’s handled, it’s a key to success. The better our Brand Care Specialists understand your company and its products, the more successful the program will be.
• Make the upsell affordable. Adding a $9 item to a $100 order is not a stretch for a customer and is almost an impulse purchase. But adding a $9 item to a $20 order is something customers will really think about. If you stick with upsell items that increase the order value by 10 to 20 percent, you’ll get more sales.
• Provide incentives for agents. Gift cards, merchandise, and other rewards for hitting specific sales goals can motivate agents, promote friendly, positive competition within your outsourced sales team, and increase your sales.
• Test different upsell strategies. There are many proven upsell strategies: buy one, get the second one half off; buy a certain dollar amount and get free shipping; buy an item and get a complementary item at a discounted price; buy an item in one color and get another one in a different color at a discount. You can be as creative as you want; the possibilities are limitless. Pick a strategy that works for your product line, then vary the products and strategies often to keep customers coming back.
• Give your agents discretion. Your outsourced agents should look to upsell at every opportunity, but should have the discretion to not upsell when a customer is in a hurry, or for whatever reason doesn’t seem receptive to an upsell offer.

Global Response Brand Care Specialists have the training, product knowledge and people skills to make upselling a source of increased revenue for you, yet still part of an overall positive customer experience that leaves callers happy to do business with your company again.

An outsourced call center can qualify leads on a 24/7 basis and provide real-time, efficient, high-touch lead response. Here’s a step-by-step process for working with a call center to get that capability.

• Plan your strategy. Develop a list of questions a call center agent needs to ask to determine the quality of the lead. The questions will show how well a prospect matches your criteria for a customer. The ones that match well are good leads to pursue; pursuing the ones that don’t is probably a waste of your time.
• Know your thresholds. Does the lead meet your threshold for quantity ordered, dollar value of order, ordering frequency, and other criteria? If yes, take the next step in the sales process. If not, decline the opportunity to pursue it.
• Know the dollar value of a good lead. Before committing time and resources to pursuing a lead, calculate what the dollar value is to your company of converting it. If you can convert the lead, but it doesn’t meet your requirements for profit margin, you may still want to walk away.
• Fine tune your lead criteria. Monitor information gathered from your call center, analyze which leads turn into sales, and fine tune your criteria to include more good leads and filter out bad ones. Make the criteria more closely reflect actual customers. Repeat this process often—even weekly is not too often.

Example—Qualifying Leads for Car Loans

One of our clients makes loans to individuals who use their vehicle as collateral. The client does not want to be bogged down with staffing and managing the lead-qualifying function; they would rather have their staff speak only with qualified buyers.

To determine if a caller meets the requirements for a loan, our agent starts by capturing each caller’s name, address, phone and e-mail information. Then, to determine the potential amount of the loan, the agent needs to assess the value of the vehicle, which she does by asking questions to find out the make, model, year, and mileage; whether there are any liens on the vehicle; and how much is owed on it. Based on the responses a caller provides, our agent can reject them at any point. If the caller meets all the criteria for a loan, we pass the information on to our client, who contacts the caller.

Example—Qualifying Leads for TruGreen

To generate leads, TruGreen runs TV ads and sends direct mail asking homeowners to call a toll-free number to set up an appointment to meet with a TruGreen technician at their home. Just as in the previous example, our client does not want to staff and manage the lead-qualifying function; they would rather have their staff visiting homes to provide quotes and sell services. So when callers respond to the ads, they reach Global Response.

Because TruGreen doesn’t want to enroll customers in zip codes outside its service areas, our agents eliminate leads coming from those zip codes. For qualified leads from the right areas, we inform the caller that a representative from their local TruGreen office will contact them.

If you have better things for your sales and marketing staff to do than qualify leads, consider outsourcing this function to a call center that’s set up to provide real-time, efficient, high-touch lead response and send only the best leads your way. That way, you’ll make sure no lead is left behind.

Preparing Your Contact Center to Succeed

For a variety of reasons, an outsourced contact center may be a better choice than your inside sales or marketing staff. Your salespeople are good at converting qualified leads into sales, while your contact center is good at being a first-responder and qualifying inbound leads—so it may be a smarter allocation of resources to have the contact center handle this important process at the top of the sales funnel. Not only are their agents trained to qualify leads, the contact center has a technology infrastructure that includes a CRM system already in place—an infrastructure designed to enable them to handle a large volume of calls, emails and chats. The contact center also has a proven workflow for efficiently qualifying and advancing leads while conveying the personality of your brand.

Once you decide to use your contact center, you can ensure you get the most benefit by integrating your CRM system with theirs. Web-based systems are made for this kind of integration and collaboration, but you can also work with a contact center’s on-premises system. With integrated systems, the agent at the center sees the same screen as your staff and can update customer records and leads in your CRM database in real time.

Drilling down further into operations, if you’re using an integrated system, you should build custom screens to enable agents to qualify leads efficiently. It’s a good idea to solicit advice from the contact center on such decisions as how best to sequence the fields, what items to put in drop-down lists, and how to minimize free-form writing. As experts in this function, they can suggest ways to make the process more efficient for them and more useful for you.

Scoring the lead via answers to a carefully chosen set of questions makes it easy to determine whether or not a lead should be forwarded to the sales team. Is it a dead lead—a tire-kicker who still requires a response but perhaps not as much attention? Is it a lead that needs nurturing? Or is it a hot lead ready to be sold? Determining the type of lead will determine how the agent responds and what the next step in the sales process should be.

Playing to the Strengths of a Contact Center

Contact centers have some advantages over an in-house sales and marketing staff in responding to inbound leads. They include:

• Availability. Contact centers are better equipped to staff for shifts outside of normal business hours, so they can provide a real-time response to inquiries that come in after hours and on weekends, when your sales staff is most likely not available to provide coverage. Some leads, like those coming from direct mail or the web, may not require an immediate response. On the other hand, leads from TV or radio ads may require a live, real-time response. To provide that, you need trained representatives available when the prospect calls.
• Rapid Response. The more quickly you respond to an inquiry with a courteous, complete answer, the better your chances of turning a prospect into a customer. Rapid responses engage prospects in a dialog with you and move them along to the next step in the sales process. In fact, the Harvard Business Review found that “Firms that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead (which we defined as having a meaningful conversation with a key decision maker) as those that tried to contact the customer even an hour later—and more than 60 times as likely as companies that waited 24 hours or longer.” An outsourced contact center is better equipped to provide the rapid response that accurately qualifies a lead.
• Scalability. A contact center can cost-efficiently add agents as necessary to handle whatever volume of inquiries you receive. Spikes in volume at the holidays, or during heavy promotional periods, can be accommodated with no loss in quality or response time. In-house sales staffs can’t be scaled up or down as easily.
• Consistency. A contact center can work with you to develop a template that ensures consistent and complete responses to all inquiries. However, a tight script may not be the best option; contact centers with skillful agents who pride themselves on “brand care” can conduct natural conversations that still reflect your brand personality. In addition, a contact center will respond without fail to all inquiries—even those that may be scored very low—so no prospects or potential sales slip through the cracks.
• Speaking the brand. Companies may worry that an outsourced contact center doesn’t know their brand personality and won’t represent it well when speaking to prospects or customers. Contact centers that specialize in brand care overcome this objection by immersing themselves in the culture of a brand so they can “speak the brand” as well as company employees.
• Professionalism. Using a contact center with well-trained agents and tight QA procedures ensures that all responses are professional in style, content and tone—all of which creates the right impression on prospects and ensures you don’t lose good leads.
• Personalization. A high-touch contact center can send formatted responses or personalized ones—both of which should reflect your brand’s personality. Many brands use a hybrid approach, where some responses are formatted and others are personalized, depending on the nature of the inquiry. Personalized responses get a better result, and a contact center has more capacity to write them and more experience than most in-house staffs.
• Follow-up. A contact center can send automatic follow-up messages to prospects, asking if they received the first response and encouraging them to take the next steps in the sales process. While an in-house staff can do the same, it’s often not a high priority. Contact centers have the discipline and established workflow to do the kind of prompt follow-up that can turn weak leads into strong ones.

Optimizing the Sales Process

Once you’ve decided to have your contact center qualify leads, you should work with them to measure, analyze and optimize the top of your sales funnel. By matching responses against your ideal customer profile, you’ll be able to refine your ability to quickly and accurately score leads. Optimize the qualifying process by experimenting with the questions agents ask, how they’re presented, and even how many are required. Be sure to establish baselines and define goals so you’ll be able to track progress and measure success.

By relying on the contact center to qualify and score leads, you free your sales staff to focus on the bottom of the funnel and spend their time doing what they do best: working up pricing, negotiating contracts and closing business. Note also that the right CRM system makes the entire process seamless, so that prospects aren’t aware of any separation between the outsourced contact center and your company.

Your marketing department has its hands full generating leads and building your brand image—that’s their core competency. Your sales staff should be busy converting prospects—that’s their core competency. And the core competency and most valuable role for your outsourced contact center is qualifying leads. Assigning them that responsibility lets everyone do what they do best, and increases the efficiency and effectiveness of your entire sales and marketing process.

Wendy Shooster is Co-CEO of Global Response, a Florida-based outsourced contact center.

But there are still benefits to having one of your own employees on-site at your outsourced call center under specific circumstances. For instance, they can head off escalations before they reach your in-house call center; offer immediate answers to involved questions about policies, procedures and products; and provide extra training on short notice to representatives so they can guide consumers through complex transitions to upgraded or new products.

When to Send a Representative

Some occasions when it makes sense to support your call center with one of your own employees are:

• Holiday peak periods, when an on-site representative can make decisions that result in one-call resolution of issues, which avoids escalating the issue to the home office.
• New product launches, when having a product expert on-site as a resource for agents can result in better, more complete answers for consumers.
• Product recalls, when an on-site representative can help determine eligibility for compensation to consumers and quickly handle unforeseen cases.
• Open enrollment periods for health insurers, when call volumes peak and consumers are weighing important financial and health-related decisions on which plan is best for them.
• Promotions or special offers, which typically result in spikes in call volume and customer service questions related to redeeming offers.

If any of those situations are coming up for your call center, you might consider sending an expert there on a temporary basis to facilitate customer service. At Global Response, we welcome clients for such visits, which can last from a day to a few weeks, depending on the reason for the visit.

Providing First-Call Resolution

For example, one of our gift merchants sends a representative every holiday season to stay at Global Response in Florida for two weeks. She handles issues here on such matters as a discount code that didn’t work, credits, questions about gifts that didn’t arrive on time, and more. Resolving those issues here on the first call prevents them from being escalated to the merchant’s in-house call center, where representatives are already very busy answering calls and emails for product orders.

In addition, the on-site representative can report back with suggestions for training that can improve agent performance or make the website or mobile app more intuitive. Another benefit is the personal contact between the call center agents and the on-site representative, which strengthens the relationship and gives both new ideas and a better understanding of how to work together to enhance customer service.

By the way, we’ve found clients from the northern states don’t seem to object to visiting us here in Florida during the winter months. We’d welcome a visit from you, too.

In a recent post on CNBC, CEO Rich Bergsund shared some statistics that underline the growing importance of the mobile channel—and the importance of supporting it to ensure a positive customer experience.

According to Bergsund, the average Wine.com order is $150, but on the iPad the average order increases 50 percent to $225. With Apple products currently making up about 80 percent of all mobile traffic to Wine.com, the company had good reason to create its own mobile-specific website that makes the buying process easier for consumers shopping on any mobile product, be it an iPad, iPhone or Android-powered device. The site allows customers easy access to Wine.com’s full catalog of wines and, most importantly, an express check-out system that makes mobile purchases easier to execute.

“We want to make the process hassle-free,” says Bergsund, who hopes the new site “will increase our mobile sales by 4 to 5 percent.”

He says that “last year, the day after Christmas, 20 percent of all sales came from the iPad. People were at home relaxing with their gifts. This year, and going forward, we’re going to be ready no matter what platform they are shopping on.”

How can you support the growing number of customers using your mobile channel? Here’s a quick guide to getting started.

Customer Support for Mobile Apps and More

As your partner in delivering a great customer experience, your call center needs to be ready and able to provide high-quality, high-touch support for your mobile shoppers. Here’s how you can help.

• Provide your call center representatives with mobile devices—smart phones and tablets—running your company’s application. This ensures they can replicate your customers’ experience and deliver superior support.
• Work with your call center to create a platform that will use mobile device emulation software (device emulator, browser emulator, or operating system emulator) so that they can, on their desktop, duplicate the customer’s experience and see exactly what the customer is seeing so they can provide clear, accurate support.
• Work with your call center to develop an overarching strategy for mobile support. Identify and monitor mobile-related customer support issues, read reviews of your app, communicate with developers to quickly address issues with the app, publicize updates that fix problems, etc.

Supporting Mobile to Build Your Brand

An effective support program for mobile shoppers has all the benefits of your existing support program for online and call-in shoppers. It can increase sales, take advantage of upsell and cross-sell opportunities, explain and clarify policies, and be a tremendous help in the overarching goals of building your brand and your business.

Do you already have a mobile strategy in place at your call center? How is it helping you deliver support to customers who are using this increasingly important channel?