This month, I’d like to fill you in on a little known eCommerce industry secret: More and more online retailers are using their site search solutions to improve the efficiencies of their call centers. Why spend thousands of dollars and hours to integrate, update, maintain, and train employees on additional call center software when site search is already a part of your website?

Call centers are often judged on a multitude of KPIs such as average talk time per caller (ATT), calls answered per hour per agent (CPH) and service level (SL), which is the percentage of calls answered within a decided time frame. Thus when a call center receives a service request, team members need to immediately find and order the product for the customer, while providing any other relevant information that is requested, or relevant to the purchase like possible up-sells or cross-sells. Since the products on your site are the ones that your customers see and order, consistent site search and call center experience is important to improve the response time between your customers’ questions and your call agents’ responses.

When your call agents use your site search, you can improve the performance of your call center while increasing customer satisfaction. There are specific features we recommend using in this case, such as SKU jump, partial SKU match, and inventory status notifications.

With SKU jump, call center team members type in the item number (or SKU) and the product page automatically comes up without having to click through search results. By matching the SKU exactly and jumping to the product page, this feature not only speeds up order time but improves the chance that the right item was ordered.

If the customer is looking for a broader range of products, say different sizes, colors, and shapes; partial SKU match allows team members to quickly locate relevant products that fall under the partial SKU logic. Whether it’s a combination of dots, dashes, letters, or numbers, we help customers set up this logic so that their service representatives can easily locate a variety of products with just a few keystrokes.

Inventory status is another necessary feature for call centers since they need to know what’s in stock. It can be very beneficial to show a graphic indicator such as a big red box saying “only a few left” or “limited stock” if the stock is running low, since this call to action encourages customers to order. A more detailed graphic indicator could even show the exact quantity remaining if the stock comes close to a single digit amount.

Some of SLI’s customers also want to see the internal site search usage volume and gauge trends during specific time periods, so we built out an internal site search activity report for them. This may help them judge seasonal trends or see how call centers utilize site search during the least or busiest of times.

King Arthur Flour is an excellent example of an eCommerce website that has taken its community and content to the next level. Not only does the website have tools and materials for bakers, they have a thriving community of pastry enthusiasts who share and discuss the best baking recipes and articles. So I was very excited to work with such an interesting company when they contacted us to build their new site search.

Their vibrant community contains a plethora of recipes, products, and articles, which translates into tons and tons of data. The volumes of data not only fall under one segment, but there also exists “different types” of data with unique categories under each product, recipe, and article. So a search for “cookie” must be made easy enough so that visitors can get to a specific cookie cutter, cookie mix, or cookie recipe without going through hundreds of search results.

Beyond their data, their new site search required an easy-to-use and clean user interface to match their streamlined design. Website usability and design alone are two of the most vital but difficult areas to perfect. You can easily over or under bake your website by adding too many or not enough toppings and ingredients. Too many features, and you get an overly complex website with lots of clutter; not enough features and your visitors are unable to fully utilize the website.

After reviewing their feed and discussing King Arthur Flour’s requirements, we decided that Adaptive Rich Auto Complete was a right recipe for their content-rich but visually clean site.

Adaptive Rich Auto Complete queries different “data sets” on the fly depending on what section of the site visitors are on. If the visitor performs a search for “cookies” in the recipes section, the visitor should only see cookie recipes in the Rich Auto Complete drop down and not cookie products. Similarly the Rich Auto Complete drop down will only display cookie products when the visitor is in the products tab.

Since website real estate is limited in a Rich Auto Complete drop down, retailers need to make sure that only the most relevant and properly segmented results show up. Adaptive Rich Auto Complete helps reduce additional refinement clicks needed to get to the right product, which leads to faster order times, less frustration, and more sales. This has to be not only one of the coolest looking features I’ve seen on a site, but also one of the most functionally useful.

I have to add that even though King Arthur Flour’s site search concoction was a complex mix that had to be served in a tight implementation time frame, the team at King Arthur Flour was highly responsive, receptive and definitely a pleasure to work with.

Feel free to email me at discovery@sli-systems.com or call 1 (866) 240 -2812 if you would like to hear more about how I worked with King Arthur Flour.

I recently implemented our search solution on a customer site called Thompson & Morgan, and wanted to let you know about it. It was a pleasure working on their site, and I learned a lot about plants and seeds. I implemented some cool features, and Thompson & Morgan is already seeing the benefits, as we described in our recent press release “Thompson & Morgan’s Online Shopping Experience Flourishes with Full-Service Site Search from SLI Systems”.

“Schloss Wackerbarth” isn’t easy to say and it’s even tougher to spell – but if you love hydrangeas, you should shop on Thompson & Morgan’s website (www.thompson-morgan.com) because “Scholoss Wackerbarth” is easy to find even if you don’t know how to spell it. Thompson & Morgan has been around since 1855, when they  published their  first catalogue, and now sells  seeds and plants internationally through their online store. Previously visitors may have gotten zero results when misspelling hard-to-remember plant and seed-related products as their search engine was not smart enough to understand misspellings. To remedy this, I helped Thompson & Morgan implement several new search features on its site, which ensures that their customers will be able to track down plants like “hydrangea macrophylla” (that’s another name for the Schloss Wackerbarth hydrangea!). SLI’s Auto Complete feature, which I recommended to Thompson & Morgan, plays a big part in helping their customers find products even if they’re not sure of the spelling. Auto Complete lets people type in just a few letters and see a list of product names, so they don’t have to worry about getting the name just right.

I also worked with the seed and plant retailer to add many useful refinement features that help shoppers narrow down their search results. For instance, people can see search results broken down into products or articles, which brings informative content to their attention. Customers can also search for plants and flowers by color, which is important if you’re trying to coordinate new plants with the rest of your garden. They can also see reviews and ratings right in search results, which can offer guidance on the best product to buy.

If you’d like to find out more about the work I did for Thompson & Morgan, just email me at info@sli-systems.com or call 1 (866) 240-2812.