Matador

Call Center and Ecommerce integration

Sooner or later, all ecommerce web sites of any significant size realize that they have to run a call center, just as all mail order telephone order businesses have realized that they need to sell on the web. Today, Intershop ASP’s are only helping their customers meet half their needs. They are leaving a huge piece of business on the table: the ability to offer an eCRM or Customer Relationship

Management solution for running a call center that’s fully integrated with an ecommerce site. Caliber Design.com’s Matador software is a solution that you can offer your clients that will enable them to process the typical 80% of a business’s transactions that do not originate directly on the web. There are literally hundreds of ASP’s that offer ecommerce solutions, but there are currently none that are selling a completely integrated ecommerce Mail Order Telephone Order transaction processing system.

Our call center software that we call Matador was developed for the nutritional supplement company MassQuantities.com. Mass Quantities was running Intershop but had no way to process a telephone order. When someone called in with questions about a product, the call center could not immediately close a sale and instead had to direct the customer back to the web site.

Our patent pending application was developed by a leading programmer from Netscape and Quantum Art, and runs on top of Intershop. CaliberDesign.com’s Matador is the most pure case of a market-driven technology. When we set about integrating the Mail Order and Telephone order operations with the web site for the nutritional supplement company, we soon realized that we would have to develop a solution ourselves. There is no off-the-shelf web store solutions or ASPs that provide Mail Order and Telephone Order integration with a web storefront. If another solution had been available, we would have bought it.

How Matador Works

Customers call in all the time to a business with needs related to their order. They might ask:

·         Can I place an order over the phone instead of on the web site?

·         Can you pull up my web order and make sure I placed it correctly?

·         Where’s my package?

·         Can I add an item to my order I placed on your web site?

·         Can I upgrade my shipping method from ground to overnight?

·         I’ve changed my mind, I don’t want one of the items I ordered, can I get a refund?

·         Can I create my order on the web and then mail you a check?

·         I’d like to order your product that I saw in a catalog, or in a magazine, or on TV.

·         I want to fax in my order.

Matador from Caliber Design makes this all possible. It turns Intershop into a complete mail order phone order processing solution that a call center can use to administer customer transactions whether they come from the web, telephone, fax, or the postal mail.

Intershop by itself is the best solution for running an ecommerce web site. And ASP’s are making lots of money by selling it. However, ASP’s can make much more money by offering their customers a solution for processing the typical 80% of orders that are not web based. By investing in Matador, ASP’s give their clients the perfect technology to support customer questions about the orders that are web based.

With the Matador software, MassQuantities.com saw an immediate 30% increase in sales just by having a means to take telephone orders. And Mass Quantities is strictly a web based company. With Intershop and Matador, ASP’s now have a solution that you can sell to catalog and direct response businesses.

There are two main differences with Caliber Design’s Matador application and other CRM applications.

The first difference is that our software allows managers and call center agents to process transactions. Most CRM software is only a unified interface to various methods of customer contact, such as email, telephone, and chat but what is lacking is the means of actually processing a credit card or check order. With Matador, a call agent can query customer histories, specific order details, take new orders, process refunds, and track packages.

The second difference is that traditionally, call centers have used a client-server application architecture to run a mail order telephone order operation center. A mail order business, in this instance, requires a dedicated and experienced IT department who can install software on each agents’ PC and keep data synchronized between the web transactions database, the call center database, and the inventory database. Our application requires no PC client and runs right through the web browser. This allows for a distributed call center enabled anywhere you have an Internet connection.

As I mentioned earlier, ASP’s offering ecommerce solutions are commonplace, but there are none that offer a unified system for processing all forms of customer transactions. If you are just offering a system for processing the ecommerce portion of a business’s orders which typically account for only 20% of a business’s transactions, it is very easy for your customer’s to jump ship and move to another ecommerce ASP. However, if you are offering the system that processes 100% of your client’s transactions, it becomes nearly impossible for them to leave you.