How to take your e-commerce business to the next level

Several industries across the globe have been drastically affected by the pandemic. E-commerce, one of the fastest-growing sectors, has been one of them. Unlike the majority of the industries, e-commerce companies have recorded a whopping surge in sales and revenue over the past few months. It has been a crucial journey where online businesses have realized the value of replacing traditional resources with SaaS-based automation platforms to take their sales and support workflows to the next level.

Capterra data shows that 47% of the enterprises that implemented a customer relationship platform (CRM) solution have reported better customer satisfaction since the adoption of the software.

In addition to automating the sales and support processes of enterprises, CRM helpdesks have helped online businesses achieve increased CSAT ratings and customer retention rates. This has widely contributed to maximizing revenue as well.

Key features of a CRM platform that can help take your e-commerce business to the next level

1. Enterprise-grade ticketing automation - E-commerce platforms encounter huge amounts of customer queries and requests at any given point of time. A SaaS-based CRM solution can automate your ticketing process by assigning a ticket to the right agent or the relevant team. Furthermore, your support team can resolve, escalate, or close the ticket as and when necessary within the cloud CRM itself. A support agent can also access all the relevant customer data needed to resolve the ticket within a few seconds. This reduces customer wait times as agents resolve tickets faster with complete context.

2. Contact center - customers reach out to brands and support centers through their preferred channels of communication. This could include calls, emails, live chat, or even social media. It’s essential for e-commerce firms to be omnipresent and respond to these queries on time. An intelligent helpdesk brings all customer communications to one place. Support agents can respond to incoming queries across multiple channels through a unified dashboard, which directly contributes to first-time resolution (FTR).

3. AI Chat automation - The face of customer communication has been transformed by the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning in Chat. An intelligent chatbot can recognize the intent in the query to respond with instant, contextual answers. This is powered by a natural language processing (NLP) engine. Having a smart chatbot in place can help in resolving customer queries quickly with no agent dependency.

4. Order management - E-commerce platforms can review all the orders on a single dashboard as well as automate the order fulfilment process using a CRM solution. You can also streamline workflows by seamlessly integrating the CRM with payment, fulfilment, shipping, and enterprise systems. You can also segment and profile your customers using a helpdesk to serve them better.

Sheshgiri Kamath, Co-Founder & CEO, Kapture CRM

5. Self-service portal - The way e-commerce companies serve their customers has been revolutionized by self-serve portals. In essence, a self-serve portal is an extension of a website where customers can find answers to commonly asked queries and perform simple actionable tasks by themselves. As these portals involve no agent interference, it helps businesses save precious time and cut down on costs while customers can get answers to their questions within seconds.

6. Cutting edge analytics - Get intelligent answers to make smarter, data-driven decisions. A powerful reporting engine provides reports and metrics that help e-commerce platforms gain valuable insights into their sales and support processes. Not only does this help in tracking and monitoring productivity, but helps in making better data-driven decisions as well. Reports related to SLAs, the first response time (FTR), initial turnaround time among many other metrics can help businesses better strategize their support process.

In addition to having these features, an intelligent SaaS platform should also be able to integrate with the most used and preferred platforms such as Shopify, woo-commerce, Magento among others to ensure that your sales and support processes run seamlessly.

What’s more, cloud CRM solutions help e-commerce platforms take advantage of all these cutting edge capabilities even while working remotely. Using a mobile CRM application on a smartphone, support teams can attend to customers from any part of the world without any hassle!