How to Set Up A Profitable Ecommerce Call Center 

Setting up a profitable ecommerce call center may seem like a mission impossible.

Wait, can call centers be profitable? Of course, you improve customer service, but what about all the people you must hire and the infrastructure this requires?

Setting up an ecommerce call center that brings a profit is possible through outsourcing. We’ve already talked about the importance of outsourcing your customer service to a professional company.

Now, let’s see what the best way of setting up your ecommerce call center is and how to do it.

Should I Set Up An Ecommerce Call Center?

The first thing you must ask yourself is whether you need to set up your call center.

If you’re running a small ecommerce business with just a handful of people, a call center would be a waste of resources and time.

You can talk to customers directly and solve their cases as they occur. Even if you hired people to do this, they wouldn’t have a workload to deal with. Slightly larger businesses may profit from a small in-house customer support team that would handle calls and emails.

But everything beyond that turns out to be a major expense for your business.

Setting a large call center – the one we all have in our mind – requires a lot of time and money. If you need one, why not just outsource it?

After all, a call center is something every ecommerce business can use. Improving customer service means return buyers who trust your brand and would likely recommend you to someone else. And that means more money in the bank.

Also, your customers have a chance to talk to your company representatives and that human element adds certain value to your brand.

The Challenges of Setting an In-house Ecommerce Call Center

If you still believe that it is better to have an in-house team, then you must be fully aware of the challenges of establishing a call center.

While there are some benefits to doing this in your company, the disadvantages simply dwarf them.

Infrastructural Needs are Grave

Some of it, we mentioned at the beginning of this article, but infrastructure is something you must think about if you want to establish your ecommerce call center.

First of all, as your demand increases, more people will call you to help them with orders, returns or anything else related to your business. And that means that you’ll need more people handling calls and emails.

While remote work is taking over and you can certainly consider hiring people to work from home, having a team in the office allows them to deal with issues more quickly and efficiently.

Also, most call centers record calls in order to improve conversations in the future but also have proof if things go south with customers. This is something most people will not agree to, especially if they’re using their own laptops.

So either way, you need to send them over technical equipment and make sure they have a solid internet connection as well as a peaceful environment to work in.

Lastly, to house more people in your office, you need a bigger office. And a bigger office is a more expensive office. The only way to get over this infrastructural hurdle is to have your agents working from home.

But still, it is a hurdle we must mention.

Most Ecommerce Stores Encounter Seasons

Establishing an ecommerce call center is more than just creating teams and solving infrastructural needs.

Ecommerce stores often have seasons, which is something you must take into consideration, especially when we talk about a call center you plan to set up.

During peak season, you’ll need more people on your watch, calling or answering calls. But what will you do with those people in the off-season?

They’ll have no more than a few hours of active work in a day. Firing them isn’t a solution but retaining them with no work is eating up your budget. Working in a call center isn’t seasonal, but this is something you must take into account.

Efficiency Isn’t There

To create a profitable ecommerce call center, your agents need to be well-motivated and know how to talk to customers. Long gone are the days when people dealt with monotonous calls and handled the same issues.

While not the most interesting job on the planet, call center agents can be incentivized to work hard with realistic goals they’d get a bonus for and multiple rewards that await them each month they perform well.

Outsourced call centers are often set up this way. As for the job itself, agents are using their time efficiently, following up with clients and getting to know their pains and solving their problems.

Instead of Setting Up a Call Center Outsource It

Instead of dealing with these problems, you can already reach out to a call center. Once you do, work with them during the onboarding phase and let them do their wonders.

Outsourcing isn’t a step a lot of ecommerce businesses are ready to make. While building your call center does have its limitations, so does finding a reliable outsourcing company, deciding when the right time to outsource is, making sure your partner’s in line with your values and is competent enough.

Benefits of Outsourcing a Call Center

While you can benefit from outsourcing different aspects of your ecommerce business to an international company, a call center is a crucial part of your customer service and it can’t be neglected.

But we won’t talk a lot about the benefits of placing a call center into someone else’s hands. We’ve mentioned the challenges of building a call center in your company.

Well, outsourcing solves these problems immediately. There’d be no infrastructure you’d need to create.

International call centers have infrastructure large enough as they often work with multiple clients. They have enough people with all the required tech for agents that can focus on their work.

Speaking of people, call centers know how to handle seasonality. Most of the companies abroad you can outsource to have teams working on various projects. They can simply switch people to different projects and have them handle different tasks.

Even if there’s an offseason, they always work on refinement of scripts, looking for different ways to perfect their craft and follow up on clients constantly.

As we’ve already said, they have the systems in place to keep the agents happy and motivated. Agents can work more money if they put in more work, while they also have quality of service in mind.

How to Set up a Call Center with Morph

Now it’s time to start outsourcing and Morph Networks is here to help you out. With years of experience in the industry, we can meet your outsourcing needs and help you set up a call center that’s perfect for your ecommerce business.

We have all the tools necessary to get started, but let’s explore how this process works first.

Get in Touch With Us

First of all, you need to get in touch with our team and let us know more about your business and what you would like to get from a call center.

Feel free to write us a longer message sharing valuable information with us so that we can best prepare for our meeting.

Schedule a Call

The moment we receive the message, we will contact you to set up a meeting where we can talk more about your business and your ecommerce call center and what we can bring to the table.

The call is completely free and we’ll come up with the offer for you once we know more details and what’s expected. Will our agents make the phone calls or receive them? What do you want to achieve with your call center? What are primary goals and deadlines? What’s the workload we can expect?

The more information we get the better it will be for both of us.

Onboarding Phase

Outsourcing doesn’t simply mean letting others take full control without your involvement. This is something a lot of companies are worried about – that they’ll find an outsourcing partner who will reduce the quality of their business and that they won’t be able to do much about it.

The worry is justified as your outsourcing services aren’t as cheap (it’s a lot cheaper to outsource then build an in-house department) and you want your investment to pay off.

With Morph Networks, we’ll go through an onboarding process together so that we best understand what to do. Although our agents are experienced, it’s important for you to be a part of this process and point out things and set goals.

Onboarding looks different for every ecommerce company and it depends on which part of your business you outsource.

We’ll Start Working

After we agree on the terms and conditions, there’s not much left to do but for us to start working. Your call center is live and it can only get better from there.

Reporting and Performance Trackers

One of the biggest benefits of working with Morph is that we track performance and send reports to you regularly. You’ll always have insight into what’s going on with the call center and what we have achieved every month.

All you need to do is have a person representing your company that will be working with us and keeping track of what’s going on. So, instead of the entire call center, you can only have one person responsible for your customer satisfaction and allow us to do what we do best.

Reports can be sent monthly or quarterly or during any other period. We’ll agree what will be included in the report and which information is relevant for you to make future decisions.

However, working with Morph isn’t a one-way street. Our experienced team will propose what can be done to further improve your customer support. As we’ve said, we have years of experience in the industry and we know what your ecommerce needs based on everything we’ve done in the past for businesses.

Honing the Process Overtime

At Morph, we are seeking continuous improvement. From the moment we start working, we’ll look into different ways to help you improve your business by providing impeccable customer support.

In addition, our call center agents speak perfect English and your clients will always have a feeling that they are talking to someone from your company.

Let’s Set Up Your Ecommerce Call Center

It’s time we set up your ecommerce call center! We’ve got everything a well-oiled call center needs – professional personnel, technical support and all the infrastructure necessary to sustain a large workload.

It’s up to you to take the first step. Let us know what you are selling, what you need help with and how many customers you’re serving. Whether you are selling your products in the US or globally, we’ve got you covered.

Contact Morph and we’ll get back to you and don’t forget to follow our blog page for more insightful information about outsourcing and share this blog with ecommerce stores that will find it useful.