24 Hour Answering Services and E-Commerce Go Hand in Hand

You may have heard about the buzzwords sweeping the Internet nation: e-commerce or e-commerce marketing. You also may be flooded with questions about how your e-commerce website can benefit from the latest trends being practiced. What is e-commerce exactly? How can 24 hour answering services help my e-commerce website? In this article we focus on getting to the bottom of this buzzword so you can apply it in your marketing and customer service strategies.  

24 Hour Answering Services and e-Commerce

What is Commerce?

Commerce is the activity of buying and selling goods or services, especially on a large scale. Commerce also describes the social relations of exchanging views, attitudes and cultures.

The origin of the word dates backs to 1530-40 deriving from the Latin word commercium (to trade together).

What is E-Commerce?

While the first usage of combining the words electronic and commerce was established in 1998, e-commerce has recently taken off among the masses. So, E-Commerce is just our modern way of characterizing the buying and selling of goods and services over the Internet.

So many variations of the word roam the Internet: eCommerce, E-Commerce, ecommerce or e-commerce. They all describe the same concept, the electronic ability to reach the world in order to sell your products and services.  

Define E-Commerce Answering Service

Your e-Commerce website can provide top quality 24 hour answering services to your new and existing on-line customers. Providing an exact definition for the purpose and use of an e-commerce answering service is not simple. The best way to describe the value we can bring is to show you examples of how we help run your e-Commerce website.

Our live receptionist service can perform the following duties at a fraction of the cost it would take you to hire in-house help:

• Website Customer Service General Hotline
• Website Troubleshooting and Answers to Frequently Asked Questions
• Product Order Taking and Secure Payment Processing
• Department Message Taking and Call Forwarding
• Virtual Hub for Logistics and Delivery Services
• 24 Hour Answering Services Ensures All Time Zones Are Covered
• Obtaining Lead Information for Help With Customer Retention Plans
• 1-800 Coupon and Special Promotion Campaigns
• Product Description and Troubleshooting Support
• Preliminary Screening and Survey Intake Virtual Services

As you can see, an e-commerce answering service can offer you the personalized marketing and assistance your e-commerce site needs to survive in today’s market.

Go 24/7 or Go Home

E-Commerce has no time zone constrictions and a modern business owner will commit to a business model that can run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Clearly, the normal business hours in New York are going to differ from the business hours in Rome, Hong Kong and all the other major cities in the world.

If you want to be able to call your e-commerce website an international success, you have to start opening your business up by providing 24 hour access for 24 hour selling potential. Our live receptionist service attends to your calling customers that prefer to speak with a live representative of your company.

When your e-commerce website visitors have a question and are stuck on your website; if they have no one that can walk them through their questions on their timetable, they will most likely click back to the next website in their Google search results. You just lost a lead that could have been converted into a sale by one of our award winning virtual receptionists.

Protect Your Brand’s On-Line Reputation

According to WebLoyalty, 22% of on-line searchers prefer to call a business and speak with a live person to complain about a product or service. In the same study, it was shown that 31% of searchers will leave their complaint on that company’s website.  

The different methods of preferred communication are pretty close and you must ask yourself: Would you rather have your customers post their complaints, unfiltered, right on your website or in a review? Or, would you like the caller control and customer service techniques that are available with our live receptionist service?

Our virtual receptionists are trained in handling customer complaints and are winners of international customer service awards. We can turn a negative experience into a positive one and all the while, protecting your brand’s on-line reputation.

The benefits of having 24 hour answering services doesn’t cost your business a fortune. A Courteous Communications pride ourselves in being able to work with any e-commerce website budget and can even offer overflow assistance for a more affordable option. With some services as little as $10 a month, there is no reason you shouldn’t take advantage of our thirty years of experience and perfect customer service record.  

Call us today to see what our 24 hour answering services can do for you

Click here to request a quote from an account specialist and start calculating the return on your investment that all of our clients experience!