Elevating Customer Service: How Perfaware is rewriting the CSR playbook with IBM Call Center
Putting the Customer First with IBM Sterling Call Center Application
In today’s competitive retail landscape, the customer journey doesn’t end at checkout — in fact, that’s where the most critical phase begins. A smooth and frictionless post-purchase experience is essential for retailers aiming to build long-term customer loyalty and drive repeat business.
Part of delivering that seamless experience involves meeting customers where they are — whether they need help placing an order or canceling/tracking orders. In these moments, a customer service representative (CSR) may need to step in and assist with the purchase. This is where assisted order placement, powered by IBM Sterling Next Gen Call Center, becomes a game-changer.
Pre-purchase challenges: what ails cart-to-order conversion
Despite the rise of digital shopping, a staggering 75% of all pre-purchase interactions with CSRs involve a cart that the customer has already created online. Yet, CSRs often lack visibility into these carts—forcing customers to repeat their intent and preferences during support calls. This disconnect leads to lower conversion rates, reduced average order value (AOV), and longer interaction times, ultimately increasing the cost to serve.
Some of the major challenges faced by businesses are:
Visibility into customer’s open carts from web
Customer’s shopping patterns
Inaccurate inventory availability
Out-of-sync promotions and discounts compared to web
Lack of flexibility in payment methods
Bridging the Gap
Perfaware partnered with a leading Canadian multinational athletic apparel brand to address these issues head-on. The solution? Integrating the customer’s shopping history and bringing web equivalent capabilities directly into the IBM Sterling Call Center.
This integration empowers CSRs with real-time visibility into customer buying patterns, enabling them to:
- Understand customer intent without repetitive questioning
- Proactively guide customers toward completing their purchases
- Recommend relevant products or promotions based on cart contents
The result is a smoother, more personalized shopping experience that drives higher conversions and customer satisfaction.
While the out-of-the-box Call Center Customer page provides basic visibility into customer address, payments, orders, and draft orders, it lacks insight into the customer’s browsing behavior and preferences on the website — such as wishlist items or shopping interests.
To bridge this gap and further streamline the buying journey, we have enhanced the Customer Details view with custom features that empower CSRs to offer more personalized and proactive support. These enhancements include:
Shopping patterns
Visibility into the customer’s closet, interests, and wishlist items
Product availability and discounts
Enabling CSRs to make timely, relevant recommendations
Wishlist-to-order conversion tools
Helping turn browsing intent into actual purchases.
Display all Customer Gift cards
provided for earlier Returns/ Appeasements, which can be utilized for future purchases.
The image displays the IBM Sterling Call Center interface with a comprehensive view of a customer’s profile details.
Order Preview - for fast order summary
Today’s CSRs expect fast, intuitive interfaces that deliver concise, clear information with minimal clicks. While the OOTB IBM Sterling Call Center allows CSRs to search and view orders in detail, it often requires opening the Order/Return summary page to access item specific information. To streamline this, we introduced a custom Order Preview feature. This enhancement reduces response time and improves the overall support experience, especially during live customer interactions.
Below is a snapshot of the IBM Sterling Call Center Advanced Order Search Screen with Preview.
The CSR’s Digital Colleague
The next frontier in customer service is AI assistance.
Perfaware has developed an AI-powered retail chatbot designed as a call center plug-in to enhance customer service by efficiently handling inquiries like order status, store location, and order cancellation.
When a customer wants to return an item, the chatbot can instantly scan return policies and provide a clear answer—no waiting, no transfers. This not only improves customer satisfaction but also frees up CSRs to focus on high-value interactions.
Ready to transform your customer service experience? Let’s connect and explore so we can develop Next Generation Call Center solutions together.
Author Details
Pooja V
IBM Sterling consultant
An IBM Sterling consultant with hands-on experience across call center legacy and next-gen platforms. I’ve designed and implemented pre-purchase and post-purchase flows in IBM Sterling Call Center using the Dojo framework, and lead teams through complex Next-Gen integrations and customizations