E-commerce Is Growing For The Jingle Bells Season
This article notes the sustained e-commerce growth in Q2 2023, approaching the pandemic peak. Deloitte predicts a 10.3% to 12.8% increase in US holiday e-commerce sales for 2023. To manage the surge, flexibility in logistics and customer service, particularly through platforms like yoummday, is emphasized.
E-commerce boomed during the Covid pandemic. It was no surprise because, in most countries, non-essential retail had to close for a significant period of time. This affected e-commerce positively in 2020 and even in 2021 because shoppers bought online instead of in physical stores.
Naturally, as the restrictions eased, shopping behaviour reverted back to being closer to how it was before the crisis. However, Forrester Research recently published that e-commerce sales reached the second-highest-ever point in Q2 2023 - just behind the pandemic’s peak. It is now consistently above 15% of all retail sales.
The 2023 holiday season is now with us - Halloween is already in the past. Retailers need to be ready for the surge in orders and the dramatic increase in customer interactions that this will also create. Accounting and consulting firm Deloitte announced that it estimates 2023 holiday e-commerce sales to grow 10.3% to 12.8% over 2022.
The Deloitte predictions show holiday e-commerce sales to total between $278 billion and $284 billion between November and January. That compares with 7.9% growth in 2022 to a total of $252 billion in holiday e-commerce spending.
Bear in mind that these Deloitte predictions are only for the US market. Still, they are showing robust double-digit percentage growth that is likely to be replicated across most developed markets.
Q4 is the busiest time of year for e-commerce companies anyway, but add in 12% growth on last year, and this is looking like a hectic period.
What can e-commerce brands do to prepare for this?
The one thing they really need is flexibility. They need to be ready to meet the demand. Your logistics processes must be prepared to start shipping far more orders than usual, but your customer service team must also be ready.
More orders means more possibilities for problems, questions, and any kind of customer interaction. This is the time of year when you must be ready.
The problem is that many e-commerce brands have an internal contact centre or a relationship with a company that manages a contact centre on their behalf. There are a fixed number of agents and limited physical space to expand the team. There are not many options that allow you to double your customer service capacity just for a couple of months.
This is because traditional customer service processes were designed without flexibility in mind. They were designed around the contact centre rather than around the needs of the brand and customer relationship. Why build a solution based on the number of customer service agents rather than the number of customers needing help?
This is why yoummday is different. We have subject matter experts located in countries all over the world who can connect to our contact centre platform. They work from home, so we don’t have the restrictions of a contact centre. If we need to double the number on the team just for the holiday season, then we can double the number of people on the team without worrying about finding desks.
E-commerce companies are naturally intelligent, flexible, and innovative. It’s time for e-commerce customer service to follow the same principles.
For more information about the yoummday approach to twenty-first century customer experience please check our website here…
