SUMMARY
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MANILA, Philippines – Poised for an even greater growth this 2015, online shopping site Lazada Philippines has been ramping up its customer service prior to celebrating its third anniversary in March.
“We recently made our call center [operational] 24 hours, 7 days a week,” said co-founder and chief executive officer Inanc Balci, referring to the now round-the-clock schedule that started in February.
Working from the company’s headquarters in Makati City, the customer support team is comprised of 250 agents who have passed a “selective process” and are going through regular trainings.
As frontliners, they ensure that clients are satisfied with the firm, its products, and its services in the end.
Meanwhile, Balci and department heads meet every Friday to discuss problem areas. To identify issues accurately, “we send a survey to a portion of the customers who have received their items. This is a very specific, very detailed survey with 120 touch points,” the CEO shared.
Delivery woes
The Philippines being an archipelago, delivery still needs ironing out even for a major online retail channel like Lazada.
Outside Metro Manila, Lazada has hubs in Pampanga, Batangas, Cebu, and Davao. For these areas, they plan to activate Lazada Express to gain more control and rely less on third party logistics.
“The delivery promise differs from city to city. So when the customers buy, we try to give them an accurate approximation of when they will receive the item,” Balci said.
They need to make sure that the item arrives at the consumer’s doorstep within the specified period. In case of delay, they will try to compensate consumers for the dissatisfaction they have caused.
Delays, however, are happening “less and less every day – and significantly less in the last 4 weeks because we had a big change in our logistic operations,” he clarified.
The firm is working on delivering to areas themselves, improving its footprint across the country through Lazada Express.
Supporting merchants, brands
Apart from end-consumers, Balci said that they also pledge support to the slew of merchants hosted on their marketplace platform.
Lazada is currently home to 1,600 sellers and more or less 110,600 items. The target is to reach 900,000 products by end-2015.
It also reaches out to 1.5 million consumers to date.
To further boost these figures, the online retailer is set to hold its 3rd birthday sale on March 24 to 26. The shop fest will feature flash sales, some of its revenue makers – electronics and gadgets – and discount vouchers for night shoppers.
These efforts are in line with the expansion that Lazada is striving to reach by December 2015.
“Looking ahead, Lazada will continue to focus on increasing its assortment range, expand our logistics infrastructure, and payment solutions to further enhance the effortless shopping experience for our customers,” Balci said. – Rappler.com
An independent business writer, Shadz Loresco follows stories on entrepreneurs, technology, and finance. Her background includes 5 years of writing and editing for online business-to-business (B2B) marketing and reputation management.
Shopping cart on laptop image via Shutterstock
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