Hiring Phone Support

.....for my Canadian shopping site

[kodaks]

For a long time, my shopping websites only accepted payments online. But I have found that people may be more inclined to buy, if we accepted payments and orders over the phone.

A couple of weeks ago, I came across a Canadian company that offers over the phone- order and payment processing. Their rates are listed below (I converted them to U.S. Currency:

Monthly Service Fee: $14.95
Cost Per Call: $0.50
Cost per minute after 5 minutes of a call: $1.00
Toll free 1-800 number montly cost: $11.95

I currently average about 45 orders a day online. I am wondering if I should use this service. I am also considering to build my own call center, but it would be much more expensive. Your thoughts are appreciated. Thanks!

[lgn1]

We have somebody inhouse that handles all our customer service calls.

Only about 5% of our customers pay by phone, and we
would prefer that it would drop to zero, but you are
always going to have those people that generally believe that giving credit cards over the internet, is risky, and nothing is ever going to convince them otherwise.

Most of our calls deal with 'do you have this or that', and 'what size is this or that', or 'how long does it take to ship this'.

Most of this information is available and easy to find
on your web site, but our experince is that people ability to read dimish when it comes to websites, unless the information is presented as a graphic.

A call center will most likely be unable to answer all the customer questions, and will give a can result. A call center, does not care or is unable to determine that you may lose a sale, if you don't give a token discount for a large order.

For this reason, we do things inhouse.

[Rugles]

It is very wise to offer an 800 number for phone orders. We get 2 to 3 phone orders for every completed web order. There is several reasons, it adds a comfort factor for the consumer. People always seem to have an extra question about the product, or want to know if it is in stock. So I feel it is very important to offer an 800 number on an e-commerce web site.
One other bonus which you will not get with a call centre (Canadian spelling, eh!) is that they will not be able to up-sell. If you have staff answering the phone they can offer a better product or accessories and increase the average sale.

[kodaks]

Thanks for the help! I will sign up for the service.

[lgn1]

Rugles, you get three phone orders for every web order.
Or is that the other way around. Even so, thats a high number of phone orders. The product you sell must be quite complex or unusual.

[Rugles]

lgn1

Yes, 2 to 3 phone orders for every web order. Our large e-commerce site does both b2c and b2b. Some of the products are complicated and result in some technical support. The site is in my bio if you want to see.
We have a catalog business and we are having trouble converting our traditional b2b customers to the website. Much to the frustration of the companies owner.
When the e-commerce site was first launched in Jan. 2000 we did not put the 800 # on every page. After the first year we put it on every page and the site has turned a profit ever since. It really made the phone ring.