A few years back, popular eCommerce retailer Overstock migrated from their legacy customer support platform to NICE CXone. The transition did not go to plan. The company had multiple contact center locations with unique setups and inconsistent technology that mandated multiple rollouts over several days. 

Not surprisingly, customers were left in the lurch during this transitional phase contributing to high dissatisfaction and stress for all stakeholders. 

Setting up a contact support system may seem like a pretty straightforward process. However, this is a system that involves multiple stakeholders and steering the ship smoothly during this process, and afterward, is extremely important.

Audit Your Current Step

Before you even begin evaluating the various customer support options, it is important to audit your current setup. The objective here is to assess what the current process looks like, and where you want to take it. 

To do this, you will need to understand the following

Current support channels: How many support channels do you currently support? Most eCommerce businesses typically start with email and chat support. Perhaps, you may want to expand this further to include WhatsApp, phone call, and social media. 

Current TAT times: Customer satisfaction stems from how soon you can resolve support queries. Measure the current turnaround times (TAT) for your various support options. The new support system you migrate should make your overall process faster, not slower than what you have currently.

Bottlenecks: What bottlenecks do you currently face that prevent you from securing faster resolution times? What kind of fixes do you think will avoid such bottlenecks after migration? 

Having answers to these questions will help you shape your requirements better. 

Evaluate Your Support System Options

Once you have analyzed the list of features you like in your current process, and the features that you need in your new system to make it work better, make a masterlist of all the features and attributes that you will need in your new customer support system. 

This helps with evaluating your options. Ideally, you will need at least 3-4 options that meet these criteria in order to proceed to the next step. 

If there are no options that fulfill all the necessary criteria, you could pick between one of these three options: 

Weigh the pros and cons with each available option: Perhaps one of the support tool you have chosen does not have a phone support system. Maybe you are okay to forego this feature in favor of everything else that is available. 

Build the system in-house: Would you build a system in-house that meets all the criteria? 

Integrate multiple tools: Most online tools come with the ability to integrate with third-party apps. This allows you to enjoy the benefits of multiple tools without being tied to just one.

After you have weighed in these options, your choices become clearer. The final step is to pick one based on attributes like price, reliability, and brand reputation.

What To Watch Out For In A Customer Support System Deployment

While the process itself looks straightforward, there are a lot of things that can go wrong during the deployment of a new customer support system. Here are some things you need to watch out for.

Competitive benchmarking

An Omnichannel customer support system is wonderful. But it is also worth noting that the more complex a system becomes, the more issues you are going to face. This may not be a worthwhile use of your time, especially if you are a small, bootstrapped eCommerce store.

One way to know how much effort needs to be put in is through competitive benchmarking. What are all the other popular eCommerce stores in your industry doing? For instance, if these stores are not offering phone support, then perhaps you don’t need to rush into it either. You could instead invest in ticketing systems like Jitbit that offer strong email based customer support.

Rollout duration

Migrating your customer support system from one platform to another may be quite seamless when you are a small store. After all, you only get a handful of orders each day, and most tools come with the ability to export or import active tickets. 

However, this is easier said than done for larger stores - like in the case of Overstock. Here, thousands of orders get processed every hour, and even a few hours of downtime could jeopardize the deployment. This is all the more critical when you have multiple support stations that are not integrated. 

Make sure that these various systems are integrated and in sync before the deployment begins.

Make strategic use of AI

AI is here to stay and businesses that do not make strategic investments in AI are putting themselves at a disadvantage. According to a recent ZenBusiness study, over 90% of small business owners now see AI as an essential part of business ownership.

In the case of customer support systems, AI has been extensively used to offer instant AI-powered answers to customer enquiries, seamlessly translate past customer conversations into a knowledge base, and even the use of AI agents to process backend customer support requests without the need for a human. 

These investments make customer support operations smoother and more efficient, thereby creating happier customers.

Have contingency plans in place

When you set out on a customer support overhaul, it is important to remember that things can and will always go wrong. For this reason, it is important to have a contingency plan. This could either be a quick rollback to your older system. Or, you could also consider turning on a limited number of features at a time in order to not overwhelm the support system. 

Lastly, training your customer support force to deal with the changes is important. In the absence of adequate training, your support team is going to get blindsided by the various interface and feature-level changes, and this could reflect poorly on your brand and could lose a lot of long-term customers. 

Plan your rollout, have a backup in plan, and do it slowly and skilfully in order to ensure that the deployment is a success.