Flipkart limbers up back-end ahead of mega sale

After facing widespread customer fury during its one-day Big Billion Sale last October, Flipkart is ready to take on more than double the volume of customer calls this time around.

The second edition of the sale, from 12 am on October 13 to 11.55 pm on October 17, is an app-only event. Preparations for the sale began almost 10 months ago, with the company strengthening its logistics, supply chain and technology back-end in anticipation of the huge demand. It has been preparing its 50,000-strong seller base to handle business better during the sale.

Flipkart has added three new call centres, in Indore, Pune and Noida, over the past 45 days, which will be manned by 1,000 agents trained to handle any kind of customer query, request or complaint and resolve them in under five minutes.

All the call centres have been outsourced to third-party service providers.

“We have over 2,000 first-level agents across eight call centres in Bengaluru, Aurangabad, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Indore, Pune and Noida, who are trained to resolve 80 per cent of customer queries in the first call itself, within five minutes,” Anand KV, Senior Vice-President, Customer Experience - Commerce Platform at Flipkart, told BusinessLine .

“The remaining 20 per cent are handled by a team of 200 second-level agents, who are in turn supported by a team of 800 in-house domain specialists.

“These specialists are divided into four teams and handle queries related to large appliances, deliveries, payments and escalations. All of them are geared up to handle huge call volumes during the sale.”

On normal days, the e-commerce firm’s call centres receive about 60,000 customer calls a day, which Anand says is expected to double to 1,20,000 calls during the Big Billion Sale.

Flipkart also receives 5,000 customer e-mails and 2,500 social media posts every day, both positive and negative, including general (non-sale related) comments. While an outsourced team handles all customer e-mails, an in-house brand marketing team responds to social media posts within seven-eight minutes.

Flipkart has tied up with the top five-six payment gateway firms to ensure that there are no failures on the payment front, usually a major pain point for online shoppers.

Last year, over 1.5 million customers bought products worth $100 million on October 6. However, customers were left frustrated as the website faced technical glitches.

Many listed products were sold out, many orders were unfulfilled, customer queries remained unresolved, refunds delayed and deliveries often delayed by 15-21 days.

“We have automated a lot of our customer services. Returns can be handled by a self-service feature on the app itself, wherein customer requests are approved instantly.

“Before making a purchase decision, customers can consult with friends on their contact list on the app itself. Delivery tracking is also automated, so that customers are very clear about the status of the shipment.

“All this is to ensure great customer experience with the least effort on their part. We have ramped up our call centre capacity to handle sale and after-sale customer call traffic for the next 15 days and thereafter,” said Anand.

Rival Amazon is also hosting its pre-Diwali sale on the same days as Flipkart, while Snapdeal is all set to host a one-day electronics sale on October 12.

COMMENT NOW