Customer service is a crucial part of any type of business, including e-commerce businesses, because you want to optimize the experience customers have. Your customer service can affect your reputation, brand image, future sales, and conversion rate.
Many e-commerce operations focus most of their time and money on building effective customer service processes and strategies to increase customer satisfaction while addressing negative consumer incidents. In a time where potential customers can easily find online reviews to compare brands and products, it’s even more crucial to improving your customer support operations.
This article will walk you through some of the most important activities involved in customer support to better understand what customer support entails, how you can improve customer experience, and how you can maximize it to boost your business performance.
7 Ways on How to Maximize Customer Support for Online Stores
- Use self-service options
When it comes to customer service, ensure that you provide your customers with options to address their concerns. This will benefit the customer and you as a business owner. Take, for example, self-service options like FAQs or live chat support.
These options will greatly influence your business’ efficiency in solving common customer issues. To ensure accessibility, try integrating AI for customer service, such as bots that will answer your customer’s queries anytime.
- Make the machine-to-agent handoff seamless
While automating customer support is beneficial for both parties, it also has a downside. Over automation may make your brand look unresponsive. Automation is good, but only when done effectively. Moreover, you can’t rely on it for all types of concerns. It can’t solve all the problems because almost all customers expect some level of human touch.
Find the synergy between machines and humans and ensure that each handoff is seamless. Don’t keep letting intelligent automation run its course with canned responses or templated email replies. If you’re outsourcing customer service, have your agents ready to take on more personal and serious matters.
Read More: Ecommerce: How Outsourcing Can Help Improve Customer Service
- Make customer support about the customer
Ensure that you provide an answer to your customers. If an issue arises and the customer grows impatient, don’t get defensive or take it personally. Your customers aren’t attacking you; they want a solution, and they want it quick.
When dealing with a customer issue, always be professional and try to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. If you end the interaction feeling like the customer is satisfied and that you learned something, it’s a win-win situation for all parties involved—the customer, the customer support, and the brand’s image.
- Be proactive with customer support
Annoying emails can drive precious customers away. Don’t be that company that sends one out every week. Instead of sending lazy promotions after a purchase, offer valuable deals, and get to know what they thought of your brand after buying.
Customers are more likely to convert and make repeat purchases when you’re fresh in their minds, so make good deals and free offers to show them that you care about keeping them as a customer.
- Be accessible
Online customers appreciate getting in touch with a live agent when they have questions. Provide as many ways to reach you as possible, including phone, social media, email, text messaging, and a responsive website.
Let the customer choose the method that’s most convenient for them—your goal is to make their lives easier, not more complicated. On your website, make sure that it’s equipped with e-commerce website optimization, as it will be an excellent way to analyze your customer service and look for areas where you can improve.
- Track and record past queries
Recording and tracking customer queries will help serve as reliable pointers when a similar problem arises again. This will help you provide better and more targeted solutions to your current and future customers. Furthermore, you’ll have a better chance of providing a permanent solution to their issues because you have them on record.
Pro tip: Consider using a piece of reliable equipment or a customer support tool that will help you track queries. Something like CRM systems can help centralize your interactions with your customers. You can address key issues and learn from them with a CRM system. Furthermore, this tool allows the whole team to see what’s going on, providing an aligned solution to your customers.
- Personalize the experience
There will be instances when a customer look for a personalized approach and expert advice regarding their inquiry. According to a report by Segment, 71% of respondents are frustrated by impersonal experiences, and 33% of customers abandon a business relationship because personalization is lacking.
Ecommerce customer service is more than just tracking packages and processing order cancellations and refunds. To provide the best customer experience possible, you need to offer guidance to help customers make the right purchases and make them feel satisfied with their whole shopping experience with your company. A personalized, knowledgeable service will set you apart from other businesses.
Improve Your Customer Service Solutions
With the growing popularity of e-commerce, businesses need to be extra vigilant about their customer service system. Keeping in touch with customer service trends will help you maintain an effective customer support system is already a great challenge, and it’s going to be more difficult with more competitors out there.
Addressing common customer issues is a good first step to ensuring customer satisfaction with your support team. Another strategy you can do is to evaluate your customers’ experience throughout the buyer’s journey.
Remember that one of the important factors that affect customers’ buying decisions that are missing in online shopping that is present in physical stores is sales staff. They can ask questions and point out product damage then and there. They can’t do these when shopping online.
Providing your customers with a great online shopping experience, from eStore browsing to delivery to support needs, offers multiple benefits. Some of which are increased sales, better brand recognition, and a higher level of trust and loyalty. When customers are happy with your service, chances are they’ll continue to support your business.
