Fewer inquiries, lower costs: How CPaaS is helping retailers reduce their order to contact ratio.
Reducing your order to contact ratio can help retailers cut costs, empower service agents, and improve customer experiences. Here’s how CPaaS can make it happen.
Jeremy Martin
3 minute read
Contents
Since the dawn of commerce, retailers have continuously worked to keep the costs associated with each sale under control. From procuring goods at the right price to minimizing defects, it’s a delicate balancing act that industry leaders have become adept at.
Over the years, retailers have adopted a huge range of metrics to help them prevent costs from creeping upwards. But recently, more and more organizations have started to look beyond basic commercial KPIs and track additional metrics like their order to contact ratio to give them a more complete view of what each customer’s purchase really costs them.
Your order to contact ratio is a simple metric that shows the average number of times a customer contacts your service agents per purchase made. And with average live customer service interactions now costing retailers over $10, your aim should be to keep your ratio as low as possible.
A low order to contact ratio isn’t just good for your organization either. Customers rarely want to spend their time seeking answers from your service agents. Fewer inquiries per purchase also means faster, more convenient, and more satisfying customer experiences. So if you get this right, everybody wins.
What causes high order to contact ratios?
When a customer makes a contact center inquiry, it’s typically for one of two reasons.
They have an issue that they’re not able to solve themselves.
They’re looking for some information that they can’t easily access without help.
The former driver represents legitimate, often complex customer requests. These are the inquiries that truly demand your agents’ time and expertise. The latter however are simple, routine questions—such as “where is my order?”—that consume precious contact center resources while offering limited opportunities to delight and engage customers.
Where is my order (WISMO) calls typically account for around 60% of retailers’ inbound customer service calls. Across thousands of calls and inbound inquiries every day, that one simple question can cost retailers thousands of dollars to answer.
Your customers are never going to stop wanting answers to those questions. So, if you want to reduce your order to contact ratio, you need to find new ways of making that information either easily available through self-service channels, or provide it to them proactively, before they ask.
How can CPaaS help reduce order to contact ratios?
Enterprise-grade Communications Platforms as a Service (CPaaS) solutions like Webex Connect can help you tackle the challenge of high order to contact ratios in multiple ways.
First and foremost, CPaaS solutions enable you to build intelligent customer journeys and leverage AI-powered chatbots to handle routine customer interactions. For simple requests like WISMO inquiries, chatbots provide rapid answers without wait times, while deflecting calls from your contact center—improving customer experiences while cutting costs.
They can also help you get proactive with your customer communications and provide customers with the kind of information they routinely request, before they ask.
For example, when there’s an update on a customer’s order or delivery, you can send them rich, branded messages that tell them exactly what’s happening with their purchase, and what to expect next.
Webex Connect’s open integration framework enables retailers to pull data in from relevant systems and platforms to ensure that as soon as there is important information to share with customers, it can be sent to them through appropriate channels right away. As soon as you know something, you can ensure that they know too.
Support for Rich Communications Services (RCS) can take those interactions even deeper, enabling you to share information like order updates in the form of clear and engaging visuals, or giving customers the ability to make decisions about their orders and deliveries directly in the messages you send.
Finally, CPaaS solutions help ensure that information and answers are consistently available across a wide range of engagement channels. So, however your customers prefer to get information about their purchases, they can access exactly what they need, whenever they need it, without interacting with a human agent.
Speak to an expert to find out more on how we are helping retailers cut contact center costs, deflect inquiries and empower agents.
