Ecommerce is a challenging sector to operate in, and customer service lies at the core of every eCommerce business strategy. Mainly because we live in an era of convenience and customers expect to get serviced on the go.
Excellent service means quickly responding to customers and resolving their problems effectively, whether using Live Chat, social media, or email. It is more costly for a business to establish a brand and attract new customers than to ensure that existing customers stay happy.
Usually, people stop doing business with a brand when they experience poor e-commerce customer service. Excellent customer experience helps build trust and increases retention. A negative customer experience can otherwise decrease sales and damage your business’ reputation with negative reviews.
Best Practices to Build E-commerce Customer Service
Ecommerce Customer service and the quality of customer experience are crucial differentiators for e-commerce brands. You can implement these vital customer service strategies to improve your e-commerce customer experience:
Help Desk Software Tools
Using the correct software is as important as building the right team or implementing the right processes. When used correctly, help desk tools can be crucial in retaining customers by providing quality service and keeping them satisfied at all times. Help desk software helps improve the management of customer inquiries and makes efficient responses. It integrates with contact forms and social media platforms to ensure centralized data storage.
Customer Satisfaction Tracking
Customer feedback is the best source of insight to determine what is working for your business or not. Measuring the satisfaction levels of your customers helps you see and understand how successful customer interactions are. There are many methods to track customer happiness. Still, the most popular is the Customer Satisfaction Score, or CSAT for short.
Most surveys regarding customer satisfaction use the CSAT to determine the satisfaction levels of consumers with a service or product. It uses a scale of 1-10 or 1-5 to determine grades.
Avoid Making Customers Repeat Requests/Queries
You can probably agree that waiting on hold or repeating service requests to different representatives is the most frustrating e-commerce customer service aspect. It is a waste of time on both ends, and we have all experienced it at some point.
Ensuring customers don’t keep repeating their requests or wait days before getting a response is crucial for a good customer experience. And it can increase retention by keeping customers happy and building trust in your brand.
Live Chat Communication
Quick response times help to increase customer satisfaction and strengthen loyalty. Live Chat helps boost sales and leads to more conversions.
The instant messaging tools in live chat apps enable customers to receive help on the go rather than waiting for 24 hours or more to get an email response. Besides, it’s more convenient and less costly than phone support. Customer service reps can have multiple chats and attend to different customers simultaneously.
Multichannel e-commerce customer service Strategy
Businesses must clearly understand what platforms their customers use to engage, whether Live Chat, Instagram, Facebook, or WhatsApp, and establish a presence on each platform. Companies with a well-defined multichannel customer experience strategy usually experience high customer retention. Your goal as an e-commerce business is to ensure that your customers remain happy at all times.
Establish channels for communication and inform all customers that you can provide quality e-commerce customer service across all channels.
Availability of Key Information
Imagine you’re trying to purchase or research a product online. But all the essential information is unavailable. Frustrating, right?
Ensure that your e-commerce website has a FAQ section and includes a knowledge base with relevant information about business services and products. A well-updated knowledge base helps reduce customer support requests and improve your site’s SEO.
Hiring Seasonal Staff
Q4 is probably the busiest business period for most e-commerce sellers. More business means increased customer interactions and customer support. Although proactive measures like knowledge bases and FAQ sections help reduce customer support requests, taking long to respond to queries can lead to loss of sales.
Social Media Platforms
The delivery of e-commerce customer services using social media platforms is snowballing because people often leverage social media when they can’t connect via phone or Live Chat. Therefore, to be effective, you must be responsive.
With social media, people typically expect rapid responses from businesses. Social channels present a convenient place for customers to vent when encountering challenges. It’s also a good place for brand advocates to testify to the goodness and quality of your business.
Engaging with your clients in this manner allows you to build personal relationships and increase brand loyalty. You can consider employing extra staff to help reduce the burden of increased workloads and increase or maintain customer satisfaction.
Conclusion
Growing an e-commerce business, or any business, requires the enhanced capacity to keep current customers and attract new ones through the delivery of consistent, excellent customer experiences. The pandemic has put the masses under immense pressure on businesses regarding customer expectations.
E-commerce stores must have a deep understanding of their customers’ needs and implement suitable systems and tools to support effectively during these uncertain times. Many companies rely on e-commerce customer service teams to react intelligently and make intelligent decisions to avoid mistakes that can diminish brand loyalty.
