The Winter Retail Guide: How to ease peak in 2021

It really is as simple as that. Taking pressure off the contact centre will not only save precious time and money, but will also ensure a smoother customer experience.

Our research found that 71% of consumers had to contact customer services (CS) up to three times in a six month period this year – a figure which has undoubtedly been impacted by lockdowns and the ecommerce boom. The Bank of England say that, during peak periods, the average UK household spends almost 29% more in December than in a typical month, and a rise in spending always leads to a rise in contact-to-order ratios. One Sorted customer found that WISMO made up 40% of their contacts before implementing Sorted’s post-purchase tracking and comms solution.

Purchases are time sensitive and high emotion at Christmas, so shoppers want to know every detail of their delivery. As more customers call, email, WhatsApp, tweet or chatbot their queries and questions, CS teams feel the pressure; service levels slip, costs rise and the customer experience is damaged.

The solution is simple to implement, and very effective: allow your customers to self-serve their delivery queries with branded tracking on your website and in your app. Being transparent with parcel status puts the control in the hands of the customer, meaning fewer reasons to contact you for delivery updates. Plus, our research found that 21% of consumers said not having regular updates on the progress of their deliveries would make them shop elsewhere.

By launching branded tracking pages, musicMagpie saw a 63% drop in WISMO calls. Want to find out how much you could save by reducing WISMO and WISMR calls?

Retailers have had quite the test in the last two years, when it comes to global supply chain issues – with Brexit, the pandemic, workforce shortages and the Suez Canal blockage as just the start. The winter period sees disruption due to extreme weather, strained carrier networks, increased pressure on transport and logistics systems and seasonal illnesses for supply chain workers, to name just a few peak problems at a time when parcel volumes are higher anyway.

Realistically, things are always going to go wrong – often beyond the control of the warehouse and contact centres working overtime to protect CX. They know that it isn’t always about avoiding disruption, it’s about mitigating the impact to customers when it hits.

57% of shoppers in a recent Sorted study say that quick updates from a brand, and the offer of discount and/or a refund, would make up for the disappointment of delivery disruption. This follows a staggering 97% of consumers stating that knowing where their delivery is is important, and 60% claiming it is ‘very important’. Given that 1 in 5 shoppers in the UK are less likely to order online after just one negative delivery experience, every customer counts.

This is where accurate and timely delivery communications can add value. Keeping shoppers informed with automated comms means that their expectations are always realistic, and their experience is always as positive as possible (even when things go wrong).

You don’t need to know exactly what is going to happen, just be ready to act when it does.

The more customer enquiries, and the longer they take to resolve, the more expensive delivery operations become. The cost to resolve each customer contact sometimes sits between £4 and £6, and a McKinsey report found that last mile can be responsible for over 50% of the total logistics cost.

When WISMO contacts are high, or where customer service agents are forced to manually identify issues and browse multiple complex systems to find parcel info; seconds and minutes can turn into days, even weeks over the course of a year. All of it wasted, expensive time.

To cope with demand, some businesses simply employ more contact centre agents, putting extra pressure on the bottom line. But, during peak periods, the most impactful way to streamline costs is to simply serve customers more efficiently. Reducing WISMO and speeding up issue resolution, as above, has huge budget benefits.