An ecommerce call center is a team of agents who handle an online store's phone work: calling back customers whose card was declined or whose checkout was abandoned, taking orders by phone, and handling cancellations. Done well, it turns a slice of lost orders back into revenue.
It runs on a call center CRM: a queue of who to call, the customer's orders on screen, and a way to place the order. In ElasticFunnels that call center CRM runs on the same customer record as your checkout.
The call center integration was one of the things I built as a CTO, and it's one of the reasons ElasticFunnels exists. When we ran the phone team on a separate tool, recovery calls didn't fire, sales didn't reach the CRM, and every quarter I watched revenue leak between the tools. A call center is only as good as the data that reaches it, and how fast it arrives.
What an ecommerce call center does
Most stores think of phone support as a cost. Direct response sellers treat it as a sales channel, because a large share of the people who reached the checkout wanted to buy. Their card was declined, the page timed out, or they had one question nobody answered. A person on the phone can fix all three.
- Outbound recovery. Call customers whose payment failed, whose checkout was abandoned or whose subscription renewal did not go through.
- Inbound orders and service. Answer the number on the site and the order confirmation: take orders, change subscriptions, handle refunds.
- Saves and win-backs. Talk to customers who asked to cancel, or who have not ordered in a while.
Why the CRM has to share the store's data
The usual setup is a store, a separate call center tool, and a spreadsheet between them. Every night someone exports the declines, and every morning agents call people who may have already bought again. Picture calling a customer to rescue an order they placed on their own the evening before. You've spent an agent's time and made the brand look like it doesn't know its own customers. The fix is simple to say. The queue should fill itself from the checkout, and it should empty itself when the customer buys.
That only works when the call center CRM and the checkout write to the same customer record. When we built the call center into ElasticFunnels, it went onto the same customer record as the checkout, the CRM and attribution. The agent then sees the same orders, subscriptions and decline reason the store sees, and nobody calls a customer about an order they have already completed.
The recovery queue
The queue is the agent's to-do list. In ElasticFunnels, it fills from events in your store:
- abandoned checkouts
- failed payments and declined orders, which you can filter by decline code
- failed subscription renewals and cancellations
- win-back lists
- leads that move into a CRM pipeline stage you have set to queue them
- callback requests from a widget on your site
When a customer who abandoned their checkout comes back and buys, their pending call is cancelled. Agents press "next" and get the next customer in priority order, so nobody picks their favourite leads. Of everything in the queue, the automatic cancel is the part I would insist on. It keeps agents from calling people who already bought.
Taking orders by phone
A recovery call only pays if the agent can close it on the call. Order entry is the agent's checkout: pick the products, take the card and place the order. In ElasticFunnels agents can place a new order, add an upsell to an existing one, start a subscription or charge a card the customer already has on file.
Phone orders run on the merchant account you mark for phone orders, and they land in the same order history as your web orders. So revenue, refunds and rebills are reported in one place, whichever channel made the sale.
Dispositions and callbacks
Every call ends with a disposition: what happened. "Sale", "call back later", "wrong number", "do not call". It sounds like admin, but dispositions are what make a call center measurable, and they decide what happens next to the customer.
In ElasticFunnels you write your own dispositions for each call center. Each one can mark the call as a sale, book a callback, add the customer to the do-not-call list, close the lead, move it to the next CRM stage, or count toward commission. A callback disposition puts the customer back in the queue at the time the agent picked.
I'd keep the list short. A handful of dispositions agents actually use tells you more than twenty they have to guess between at the end of a long shift.
Inbound calls and screen pops
When a customer calls you, the agent should know who it is before saying hello. ElasticFunnels connects to Five9, ViciDial and Ytel. With one of them connected, an inbound call looks the caller up by phone number and shows the customer's record to the agent, and routing rules send the call to a call center or an agent by caller number, dialed number, region and time of day. Agents also get click-to-dial and the call recordings on the call log.
ElasticFunnels does not dial by itself. It works with the phone system you already use, or with an outside call center. HelpGrid, Logicall, SalesBound, Committed Coaches, Nuyu and Tauk connect as integrations and can work the same queue next to your own agents.
Agents, scripts and commissions
Phone sales teams are usually paid on results, and commission disputes cost more time than they should. I'd put every commission rule in the system from day one. A spreadsheet only works until the first agent disagrees with it.
- Agents and teams. Each agent has an account, a team and permissions from their role.
- A script. Each call center has one sales script, on screen during the call.
- Commission rules. Flat, percentage or tiered, based on revenue, profit or per call. Rates can differ by disposition and by agent.
- Payroll. Pay periods with approval, clawbacks and an export. A leaderboard shows who is selling.
The rules for calling customers
Calling people who started an order is not cold calling, but the telemarketing rules still apply. In the U.S. the main ones are:
- Call hours. Without prior consent, sales calls to a home are allowed only between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m. in the called person's local time (16 CFR 310.4).
- Do-not-call. Honour a request not to be called again, and check the national registry where it applies. ElasticFunnels keeps a do-not-call list per brand and takes those customers out of the queue.
- Automated calls. Autodialed and prerecorded calls have their own consent rules (47 CFR 64.1200). Collect consent on the checkout if you plan to use them.
States and other countries add their own rules. This is general information, not legal advice; have a lawyer check your calling setup before you scale it.
In-house agents or an outside call center?
An in-house team knows the product and keeps the customer relationship. An outside call center can start faster and scale up and down with your volume. Many sellers run both: their own agents on high-value recoveries and inbound calls, and a partner on volume. As long as both work from the same queue and write back to the same record, the numbers stay comparable. If I had to pick one to start with, I'd start in-house, with a small team on the highest-value recoveries, so you learn what the calls sound like before you hand them to anyone else.
The call center works together with the CRM and automations, the custom checkout and MID routing. See the call center CRM for the full feature list.
- I'd never let agents choose their own leads. Priority order and a "next" button keep the queue honest.
- Starting an order is not a lifetime consent to be called. Treat do-not-call requests on recovery calls as seriously as on cold ones.
- Don't measure agents on calls made. Measure them on orders placed and kept, which is what clawbacks are for.
- A recovery call the agent can't close on the phone is a reminder, and the buyer could have had that by email.
A decline is a customer who already wanted to buy. That's a much warmer conversation than any ad will ever start, and it's worth having, as long as the agent picking up the phone knows exactly who is on the other end.
