The Contact Center Blog

Not Surprising, but Less Spending Predicted This Holiday Season

Just released, the National Retail Federation's 2009 Holiday Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey announces a decline in spending for US shoppers this 2009 Holiday Season. According to the report, U.S. consumers plan to spend an average of $682.74 on holiday-related shopping, a 3% drop from last year’s $705.01.

This does not mean less gifts from a quantity perspective, but will definitely be looking for better deals to spend less overall.

MultiChannel Merchant reports, "According to the survey, conducted by BIGresearch, 66% of U.S. Shoppers say the economy will affect their holiday plans this year, with 84% of respondents say they’re adjusting by simply spending less. To ensure that they will spend less, 55% say they'll be shopping for sales more often, 42% will be using more coupons and 34% are putting up last year’s decorations."

Retailers will have to look for ways to gain new customers or repeat customers, not focusing only on discounting. This is the season where the customer experience is key to ensure companies bring in decent numbers for end of year results.

With Thanksgiving weekend only 5 weeks away, Retailers must act now to get what they can out of their customer's tight budgets this year.

Finding and Fostering Contact Center Agent Stars

With sales plateauing and margins shrinking, online retailers must optimize the use of their contact center, whether in-house or outsourced. One way to do this is to make sure that your agent staff is the best it can be.  At the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition in Boson this past June, Greg Fettes from 24-7 INtouch and client Leslie Agerland from ShopNBC.com discussed how to select, identify, and motivate agent stars to ensure program goals are being met. Here are some of the main tips from their presentation that are somewhat simple in nature, and yet sometimes the first to be overlooked.

Establish a Culture of Excellence - Expect excellence throughout your organization. Lay out clear goals and tie them into your overall contact center culture. Empower your employees to add value at all levels, and accountability will come naturally.

Communicate & Share Information - Communicate what is happening within your company.  Communicate program goals and where each person is doing well or needs improvement. Allow for networking to build a close culture.

Be Flexible - Contact centers have a bad reputation for being rigid in scheduling. Flexibility will result in higher retention and increased productivity in the long run.

Recognize. Recognize. Recognize - Everyone likes a pat on the back for a job well done. This is especially true for the typical younger demographic that works in the contact center. Remember to be creative – it’s not only about money! Have other incentives and perks that tie into your program goals.

Use Mentors to Build Teams - Your own employees are usually the best knowledge experts to help develop lower performing agents. Foster a mentorship atmosphere to develop tomorrow’s leaders and maintain your culture of excellence.

Don’t Forget to Have Fun - Improve morale by providing recreational facilities and break areas where employees at all levels of the company can socialize.  Invite top-performing agents to company functions such as awards dinners and by reward them with perks.

Incorporate these tips into your recognition and reward strategy. The value-added ROI will be a more motivated workforce, enhanced brand, empowered agent group and higher retention of your top subject matter experts.

Save Energy While Searching Online

One small change can make a difference, if enough people take the time to do it. This is the concept around Blackle, the energy saving search engine, powered by Google custom search. Created by Heap Media, the goal of the site is to have enough people switch from a white to black search page, taking small steps to save energy in our everyday lives.

As Blackle states, "In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages. We <Heap Media> believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy."

This is a great concept, and allows everyone to make a small change that can have a great effect. I have converted this to my home page and do not find any issues with readability.

To make Blackle your home page visit - http://www.blackle.com/set-home-page/.

Web 2.0 becomes 1,000,000th word in the English Dictionary

"Web 2.0" was announced yesterday as the millionth word in the English Dictionary, beating out Hinglish term "Jai Ho" and "Slumdog" from the popular oscar award winning Slumdog Millionaire movie.

Ironically, this comes at a time when actually using the word Web 2.0 has been common for some time. Mashable.com notes the trend in Google for the word began back in 2005 and now with social media descriptions becoming more the trend, Web 2.0 is a rare term.

What are your thoughts? What terms do you use to describe Web 2.0?

Microsoft Launches New Search Engine BING

As th search engine war continues between Microsoft and Google, Microsoft officially lanched its new search engine name, Bing, this week.

I doubt this will dominate Google, however, the new brand will likely be more effective than the previous "Live Search" brand used by Microsoft. Searchengineland.com reports, "The new name, along with $80 million in marketing that Microsoft is unleashing, will undoubtedly attract brand new visitors to Microsoft’s search engine plus get some who had previously given up on Live Search to take another look. What they’ll find is a search engine with solid relevancy plus some new features that might hook a few of them into staying."

I recommend giving Bing a try, the new layout is quite user friendly with the left hand navigation tools used effectively. The ad space is also quite clean on the right hand margin.

We will see how this change affects the potential Yahoo-Microsoft merger from 2008!

2 Online Customer Service Tips for Retail Holiday Season | ACCM

As discussed in the blog post "180 Days Until Christmas", here are the first two tips from Barry Lamm (LivePeson) and Greg Fettes (24-7 INtouch).

180 Days Until Christmas! Are You Ready?

Calling all retailers! Are you ready for this holiday season? Is your online customer service strategy geared up for one of the biggest sales seasons of the year?

Last week at the ACCM show in New Orleans, Greg Fettes, president & CEO of contact center services provider 24-7 INtouch, and Barry Lamm, director of account management and training for live chat software provider LivePerson discussed the importance of a true customer service strategy, that is planned well in advance for the 2009 holiday season.

In 2008, the New York Times reporting that "Online shopping is gaining at a time when simply filing up a gas tank to head to the mall can seem like a spending spree." This quote highlights the importance of a successful sales season for retailers in 2009, to help pull them through these tough economic times.

Multi-Channel Merchant Magazine reported on the presentation and summed up the following Holiday Customer Service Tips from Fettes' and Lamm's presentation.

Use customer service to drive ROI. You spend thousands of dollars to drive traffic to your Website. Quality customer service through multiple channels is proven to increase sales conversions and enhance the customer experience.

It’s not over on Dec. 25. Don’t forget about the post-holiday sales rush! Gift card purchases are on the rise, giving you an opportunity to exceed your first-quarter sales targets. For returns and exchanges, a seamless process will create high brand loyalty and repeat businesses.

Get more out of what you got. With fewer consumers spending, average order value is an important metric for ROI and reduced cost per contact. Use technology analytics and reporting to identify visitors who are most likely to buy and focus on upsells and cross-sells to increase the average order value.

Know your options. Don’t sacrifice sales and service because your headcount budget is frozen. Consider short-term contract work for your after-hours coverage or seasonal overflow contacts.

Lead, don’t follow. Competition is growing each year, and 2009 will be a fight to win consumer dollars. When it comes to service, lead—don’t follow your competition. Make the investment to provide a great experience and leave a lasting positive impression with your customers.

ACCM Show 2 for 1 Limited Offer

The Annual Catalog Show in New Orleans this May is offering limited time offer discount. If you register yourself today, you can bring a collegee for free! This is great offer and likely in response to many travel budgets being cut this year.

When you register, put in the CODE TFO when you register to be sure you recieve the discount. Click here to register for the ACCM Show online.

The theme this year is "Brave New World for 360 Marketers". There are a lot of new tracks and great speakers at this event.

 

Top500Guide.com - Top US Retailers Website

InternetRetailer.com has launched it's Top500Guide.com® website which is tagged as "The only source of information on the largest e-retailers in the U.S. and Canada and provides multiple years’ worth of sales, performance, product, and vendor data for the largest sites in e-retailing." The Top 500 ranks the largest e-retailers in the U.S. and Canada based on annual online sales

To access the site and data, you must register and be a subscribed user. Yearly rates start at $195 which includes a print copy and online access, with price breaks for the more users that sign up.

Internet Retailer came out with the Top 500 Guide product in 2004 and has been a valuable source of e-retailer ranking information and has become an established publication, sometimes called "the bible of the retail industry". Internet Retailer has a full-time staff of four  that gathers data year-round for the Top 500 and calls on extensive sources to ensure the authority and accuracy of the information.

In addition to online sales, the Top 500 Guide® includes data for each retailer on number of unique visitors to the site, total visits, conversion rates, number of SKUs online, site performance, e-mail marketing programs, search engine marketing programs, browser satisfaction and vendors that provide services to each retailer. It includes names of executives and URLs that each retailer uses. Extensive tables in the Top 500 Guide® show how retailers compare to their peers by type of retailer (chain, catalog, web-only, manufacturer) and merchandise category. It also includes tables of fastest growing in percentage terms, most growth in dollars, the proportion of web sales to total sales for the Top 100 and more.

To learn more visit http://www.top500guide.com/.

Official Holiday Sales Results

Multi-Channel Merchant reported today that the National Retail Federation (NRF) reported the official 2008 US holiday sales. Holiday retail sales fell 2.8% to $447.5 billion. This is the first decline posted since the NRF began tracking such figures in 1995.

In September the NRF was more positive, reportingan expected increase of 2.2%, albeit that number would have been the weakest sales growth in six years. Yet after September, the economy and continuous layoffs caused an even further decline and there was no bounce back for US retailers.

Shopping in general was at an all time low, with many shoppers bargain hunting and the increased practice of "re-gifting" to help tightened budgets.

It will be interesting to see how Q1 rebounds and many expect an upturn starting in February.