Introduction

For eCommerce and logistics businesses, seasonal surges are a stress test of customer operations. While this surge represents a golden opportunity for increased sales, it can also strain operational capacity and customer service teams, potentially leading to delays and reduced customer satisfaction.

iCXeed helps clients manage this surge in customer demand with cognitive technology and expert talent solutions.  In this case study, we highlight our approach with one of our eCommerce clients

The Problem

This particular client has a highly seasonal business. Their volume demand over the holiday season increases by 35x over the off season. Customers interact primarily online for their purchase journey, but their service journey was mostly via the phone channel.  Chat and email were other channels that were accessible to customers but less frequently leveraged.   

One challenge this client had is that they had different solutions by channel to manage customer demand. This presented challenges in appropriately balancing resources across multiple channels and they lacked a holistic view of customer as a result. Hence, volumes were inflated as customers were making requests via multiple channels. This was further complicated by the fact that each request had to be worked without knowledge of the similar requests that were made in other channels, thereby increasing duplicative effort within the contact centre teams.  

All of this created substantial challenges in their operations and drove an overall poor customer experience (CX) as wait times and resolution times exceeded tolerable limits. This resulted in customer complaints and created an environment resulting in stress and burnout amongst the contact centre team members. This then led to a vicious cycle of absenteeism and attrition during this peak period, further straining resources.

When iCXeed engaged with this client, our proposed solution was to unify channels into an omnichannel cloud contact centre, optimise the digital channel support experience to keep customers in their preferred channel, deploy AI to enable self-service for most common issues encountered, and finally improve onboarding and engagement of seasonal hires. Let us look at each element of the solution more closely.

Unified Omnichannel Support

When we began working with our client, they initially used separate systems for voice and for chat which lacked integration and created operational inefficiencies. We addressed this by unifying all of their customer channels in a cloud contact center, Amazon Connect, providing:

• A single view of the customer across all channels
• Holistic omnichannel workforce management
• Intelligent customer routing to streamline customer experience
• An improved and unified view of case and workflow task management

Operationally, this enabled seamless management of multiple channels and eliminated duplicative efforts across channels simplifying not only the agent experience but also the customer experience.

This was a relatively simple change, but the outcomes were significant. Comparatively, that experience was 5X more efficient than voice and this significantly contributed to improved efficiency during the peak season.