What are the issues faced by customer representatives while handling telephone orders? And what is an appropriate solution for them? We recently had an interview with our customer, Matt Schwartz, Founder and CEO of INSPRY, where we discussed the issues he came across with his clients and how our team assisted him. You can learn about the interview here.
RedChamps: Hi Matt! As discussed, you came across some issues faced by customer service specialists regarding phone orders and creating those orders at the backend. Would you please share a little more about it?
Matt: Our customer service specialists needed a faster and more efficient way to take phone orders via the backend. The built-in Magento backend order creation tool only allows you to search by product name and SKU, which is not sufficient. Some products might have similar names with separate configurations, which for searching, one might need more options to search from. It becomes difficult for the sales/ customer representatives to ‘Create’ complete new orders in the backend with no category dropdowns while taking instructions from the customer simultaneously. This ultimately makes the representative inefficient.
RedChamps: Were there any solutions that you tried for solving the above problem?
Matt: Yes, many! We looked at Magento core’s ability to pull in products from a logged-in user’s cart in the backend, but we found several issues for our needs. Then, we looked far and wide at different POS solutions on Magento, thinking this would be the best way to handle phone orders. Unfortunately, many were too complex (overkill for our needs), too expensive or didn’t work with all the default payment methods built-into Magento core.
We even faced some issues with the solutions we tried, like when we tried pulling in products from logged-in users cart in the backend. The customer representatives build several carts a day for different customers, who might not be ready to checkout. So, just using the customer representatives’ login to create an order and pull it through, would not work since they would need many carts at once. Also, the core system didn’t work with our custom options setup (which has third party modules, it would break the pricing completely). In addition, a majority of customers on the site are guest users so we needed a way to pull in a guest user’s customer cart.
RedChamps: Then, I guess, you came across RedChamps! So, how did RedChamps’ extensions and team helped you with your issues?
Matt: Yes, then came RedChamps! 😉 and their extension ‘Share Shopping Cart’. They turned this around in a very short time and thoroughly worked with us on testing. They even deployed the new feature into their official build. The ‘Create an order’ feature gave our team the benefit of allowing admins to create carts for customers via the easy frontend website, but also the ability for customers to create carts and then have customer representatives take over the cart to finish the purchasing process of some complex products (with many specifications). Overall, we would not have been able to solve the issues without the dedication of the RedChamps team.
Thank you, Matt, for taking your time out for the interview and appreciating our efforts. We always love working for our customers.
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