Customer Service in the E-commerce Sector: The Secret Behind Successful Online Stores

Benefits of Customer Service Outsourcing in E-commerce

Outsourcing customer service has some advantages, especially in e-commerce:

1. Cost savings: Managing an in-house customer service team can be expensive. By outsourcing, e-commerce companies can save costs such as salaries, training and infrastructure.
2. Wider opening hours: Customers want to contact customer service at times convenient to them, usually outside standard business hours. However, most online shops offer limited accessibility outside office hours. A missed opportunity, as this could increase conversion.
3. Scalability: E-commerce has peak and quiet periods. External customer service agencies can respond better to this with larger, flexible teams.
4. Expertise: Customer service is not a webshop's core business. External agencies specialise in handling customer contacts and bring expertise and experience, taking customer service to the next level.

How can E-commerce companies outsource customer service?

There are several ways to outsource customer service in whole or in part, depending on the situation, numbers, channels, languages and complexity. The two most obvious options are:

1. Full Outsourcing: The entire customer service is provided by an external agency. This is suitable for both large international webshops and smaller e-commerce companies.
2. Partial Outsourcing: Part of the customer contacts are handled by an external agency, while an internal team manages other customer contacts. This can range from times to channels, languages, and first-line contacts.
   1. Times: An in-house customer service team providing customer service for part of the opening hours and an external team setting up customer service around it. For example, internal customer service from 09:00 to 17:00 with the external partner providing service from 17:00 to 21:00 and at weekends.
   2. Overflow: An in-house customer service team that handles a fixed proportion of interactions and the external partner does the rest. For example, calls go to the internal team first and if they are in conversation they go through to the external team.
   3. Certain channels: The in-house team then does certain channels and the external team others. In practice, for example, we see the external party doing telephony and the internal team doing emails, ticketing and socials.
   4. Languages: Many webshops are internationally oriented or would like to be. They may choose to set up the Dutch customer service themselves and outsource the other languages. Many webshops choose to outsource German or French customer service, for example.
   5. First-line: Here, the external partner handles first-line contacts. The majority of customer queries are easy to handle. In e-commerce, the majority of calls are still about order or delivery statuses. These are first-line customer contacts that can be outsourced. The more complex issues are then handled by the internal team. This in e-commerce a used solution.

Conclusion on Customer Service in E-commerce

Good customer service is essential for any e-commerce business to gain competitive advantage, increase customer satisfaction and improve conversion rates. (Partial) outsourcing of customer service is an effective solution to meet customer needs and help the webshop focus on its core business while still providing high-quality customer service.