Customer Service
Homesourcing: A new customer care model for beyond the holidays
Support.com President and CEO Lance Rosenzweig explains why today's rapidly changing e-commerce landscape requires a flexible approach.
January 18, 2021 by Lance Rosenzweig
"He HADN'T stopped Christmas from coming!IT CAME!Somehow or other, it came just the same!"
-Dr. Suess, How the Grinch Stole Christmas
The holiday shopping season came in 2020 with just as many ribbons, tags, packages, boxes, and bags as ever. If anything, it arrived early: RetailMeNot reports 31% shopped earlier to avoid shipping delays or inventory issues, and 75% of Americans planned to do their shopping online.
Consumers were willing to experiment in order to preserve traditions like gift-giving and family meals. RetailMeNot also reports 35% of Americans were willing to try a new brand or store during the 2020 holiday season, while another set of data from McKinsey shows 20% of consumers have tried a new shopping method during the pandemic, such as curbside pickup and delivery, and 80% of those intend to continue.
Retail brands have an excellent opportunity to broaden their customer base through e-commerce right now — but they must provide superb customer support to capitalize on it. Forbes research shows 70% of customers will abandon their purchase if they have a bad customer service experience. If online retailers cannot provide exceptional support to their customers, they will lose them. Traditional pre-pandemic tactics cannot meet this challenge.
Before COVID, retailers prepared for annual customer support surges by adding temporary outsourced agents in the last quarter of the year. These seasonal workers usually operated out of tightly packed brick and mortar call centers, sharing equipment and rotating shifts throughout the building 24/7. During a pandemic, that is a clear threat to worker safety — enough so that many of the world's most prolific outsourcing locations shut down completely earlier this year.
Traditional call centers can't guarantee business continuity, nor are they suited to uncertain or rapidly-changing demands. This is no longer a landscape of just predictable seasonal surges. E-commerce grew during the first half of 2020 in rhythm with the pandemic. And now, coming off a strong holiday season for e-commerce, Statista predicts worldwide e-tail revenues will grow to $6.54 trillion by 2022, fueled by omnichannel shopping, mobile commerce, advancements in AR for shopping and voice assistant commerce. Now more than ever, retailers need a sustainable model that will allow them to quickly and efficiently respond to changing demands and market dynamics.
That model is homesourcing, which involves a company designing its processes, platforms, tools, and culture to support work delivered from home. Free from geographic constraints, homesourcing organizations can rapidly recruit and onboard custom-profiled customer support professionals that meet a retailer's specific skill set or experience requirements. With homesourcing, retailers can activate the customer support resources they need up to three times faster than hybrid or traditional call centers.
Not all home-based employees are truly homesourced. Homesourced employees should be custom-profiled to succeed in a work-from-home environment, and be supported by the tools to succeed in it. As Support.com COO Christine Kowalczyk puts it, "We only hire people with the right personality, work style, and time management skills for remote work. We take people who are pre-disposed to succeed as home-based employees and empower them with the tools and platforms they need to deliver the best customer experience."
Those tools are crucial. Homesourced employees need training and resources optimized for the remote environment Investment in robust, ongoing virtual learning using multiple modalities beyond lecture allows a homesourcing employer to diversify employees' areas of expertise and increase overall speed to competency. Home-based employees should also receive substantial self-support training resources on an ongoing basis to supply them with the growing knowledge base that they need to resolve complex issues swiftly and competently, with minimal holds and transfers.
Homesourcing organizations also leverage secure, cloud-based platforms to optimize service delivery and manage staff. Retailers should seek partners with processes and tools that enabling scheduling based on call arrival patterns and rapid ramping in response to demand.
A homesourcing solution should dynamically capture financial and operational efficiencies for retailers, in addition to delivering superior customer experiences.The homesourcing model is uniquely positioned to meet e-commerce customer service demands, and, in fact, addresses modern customer support challenges across numerous industries. Unconstrained by brick-and-mortar facilities and geography, the homesourcing model is a virtual native, with the tools, training, and culture to match. When fully adopted, homesourcing is effective in mitigating risk, ensuring business continuity, and providing always-on customer support.
Lance Rosenzweig is president and CEO at Support.com
About Lance Rosenzweig
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