4 Best Practices to Improve E-Commerce Customer Service
Your e-commerce’s excellent customer service increases customer satisfaction and even customer returns. Leading to repeat purchases, more profit. And a positive brand image. Check out this content for tips on how to provide amazing customer service.
What is e-commerce customer service?
E-commerce customer service is essential to keep your online store active and keep repeat customers. This includes answering their most basic questions. And also guiding them through purchasing decisions, and sending them updates. Also while creating a smoother shopping experience for the customer.
Excellent customer service builds trust. But it also encourages repeat purchases. In contrast, unpleasant shopping experiences can lead to lost profits. And also tarnished brand image, and ultimately, bad reviews.
4 best practices for a successful e-commerce customer service experience. Delight your customers and provide them with world-class e-commerce support with these practical tips.
1. Offer multiple customer service contact channels
Internet shoppers expect companies that sell online to provide multiple contact options to make it easier for them to get in touch. This improves your shopping experience. So, provide the right mix of communication channels for customer service. Such as:
Email:
Use a simple, distinctive, and memorable email address exclusively for your store’s customer service correspondence.
Live Chat:
Install a live chat option on your website to respond promptly to visitors. You can set your life chat to start the conversation. And also appear in triggers, and be operated by bots that talk like humans. Examples of software you can use are Zendesk and Pure Chat.
Phone:
Offer 24/7 phone support so you can serve customers outside of business hours. Also, increase the visibility of your hotline by adding it to your web pages, printed invoices, online and offline directories, etc.
Social Media:
Many shoppers choose to communicate with brands on social media. Set up your social media accounts, and check them regularly. And respond quickly to increase your response rates. Facebook tells users how quickly you respond to customers. It also influences their perception of your e-commerce
store. Be present on multiple channels relevant to your customers so they can easily contact your customer support team. Make your contact details visible and accessible for your convenience.
2. Use reliable customer service tools
To organize your support correspondence. And also streamline your e-commerce store by integrating robust customer service tools and customer relationship management (CRM) software. These technologies are particularly beneficial if your business is continually growing and dealing with hundreds of requests daily. Look for customer service software with these useful features;
Efficient ticketing systems:
It helps your agents sort and distribute customer requests accordingly, determine the best solutions to the problem, and avoid neglecting any case.
Integration with your existing communication channels: Choose software with multiple communication platform integrations so you can respond quickly and easily through whatever channel your customers are using.
Custom Folders:
Robust customer support technologies allow you to customize virtual workbooks by agent or team. And create prioritized inboxes according to problem severity, categorize communications by channel and time periods, star requests, and a lot more. HubSpot CRM, Zoho, and Groove are some of the customer service solutions you can take advantage of. With the right software tool for your e-commerce business. You can streamline your support workflows and respond to customer issues.
3. Provides self-service options
Give your customers the resources they need to find the answers to their questions before contacting you for help. Self-service options allow your customers to make informed purchasing decisions. This is through relevant product information displayed on your online store. This practice also minimizes the number of support tickets your agents handle, freeing them up to solve more complicated issues. Create a self-service portal on your e-commerce site through a frequently asked questions (FAQs) page and knowledge base.
A FAQs page lists common queries about your store, products, policies, and other vital information. When creating this section, categorize the customer’s questions and display your answers in an organized way. Whether you show them right away or after visitors click the preview buttons. A knowledge base is a section on your e-commerce site that provides resource materials for customer concerns. This can include video tutorials, product safety guide ebooks, and more. While self-service options seem counterintuitive. They are also powerful tools to engage your visitors and effectively improve the customer experience.
4. Assess customer satisfaction
Assessing customer satisfaction with your support services helps you determine what you’re doing right and what you still need to improve on.
Measure customer satisfaction with these metrics and methods.
Promoter Net Score:
Assess your customers’ loyalty by asking them. “On a scale of 1 to 10 (10 as the highest), how likely are you to recommend our eCommerce store?
Customer Satisfaction Score:
This is one of the essential customer service metrics that you should be tracking consistently. So ask your customers, “How would you rate your experience with our customer service representatives?” The scales for your answers can be numerical or narrative (eg, satisfactory,
unsatisfactory, etc.).
Surveys:
Your surveys can be in-app, post-purchase, voluntary, or requested via email. Adjust the format as well as the timing of your survey by asking customers to provide valuable feedback. Always remember to keep your questions brief and your channels convenient for your customers. Customer satisfaction ratings help you learn a lot about customer perception. They set the right benchmarks for your support services. And marketing campaigns, and other business activities.
An example of effective e-commerce customer service is FatFace. This is a British brand based on the south coast of the United Kingdom. It produces stylish, high-quality clothing as well as accessories for men, women, and children. These are those who consider every day an adventure. FatFace uses superior fabrics and materials for comfortable yet durable clothing. For over 30 years, the company has grown its store into a successful multi-channel retailer with 200+
stores, award-winning store design, and a booming e-commerce site.
One of FatFace’s strategies for creating the ideal customer service experience was to collaborate closely with its contact center and its creative, design, marketing teams, as well as other internal teams. These departments are situated in one building to regularly discuss and collaborate on customer concerns that overlap with each other’s work.
For example, one customer shared with FatFace how she loved the shirt she bought at the store but admitted that she was embarrassed wearing it due to her recent mastectomy. Wanting to go a step further, the service provider contacted the design team. The latter then assembled specialized scarves
that the client could combine with her blouse to hide any signs of her surgery.
Create a better e-commerce
Customer service experience Excellent customer service is essential if you want your online business to thrive in the competitive e-commerce industry. To recreate your online shopping journey using the tips in this guide. As e-commerce customer service improves, so does customer loyalty, lifetime value, as well as profit.
How to get actionable feedback and find out what customers really think Everyone knows that customers can provide invaluable insight into your business. Your customers have a new perspective. They notice things you don’t. They can tell you if you are successfully meeting their needs. Or not. And some companies – like design, marketing, or branding agencies; interior design firms, freelancers, and contractors; among many others – fully rely on customer feedback and collaboration to get your work done.
Creative work of all kinds requires a constant feedback loop between the customer and the service provider. But it’s not always easy to get customers to open their mouths. And it’s not always clear what to do with customer insight once you have it. Customer feedback, like any data, is only valuable if it is actionable.
Here are our top techniques for collecting actionable customer feedback.
Send follow-up emails
One of the most effective techniques for collecting customer feedback is a simple email. Email is still king when it comes to reaching people. Hubspot shares that 99% of consumers check their emails daily and that 73% of millennials prefer business communications to be done via email. It’s best to contact your customers after they’ve had a chance to try your service. So give them time to do that – and process the experience a bit – before reaching out.
Now, you can just make a general request for feedback. But if there’s specific information you’re hoping to learn, this isn’t the best approach. We recommend that you include a survey with targeted questions (more on this below). Keep your message short and sweet. Provide a clickable link or button to take the reader directly to the included survey.
And sweeten the pot by offering a reward for completing the survey. It could be a discount for an upcoming purchase, a gift card, or any other reward your customers’ value. And make sure the email is yours. Many emails are generic emails that could have been sent by thousands of other companies. This is where you should smartly incorporate your agency or company’s brand identity (including your brand logo and colors).
Finally, automate your email campaigns so they are sent on a regular schedule triggered by your customers’ activity. Tools like Constant Contact, Intercom, MailChimp, and Drip are worth a look. And once you set up these email campaigns, they run automatically – making this a low-time investment technique with huge potential for returns.
The art of research
There is a right way and a wrong way to create a survey. Include too many questions and you will discourage most users from participating. Include too few questions and your data will be incomplete or unreliable. We recommend that you answer 3-5 questions. That means you need to design your survey with a targeted topic in mind.
You will get the most out of specific but open-ended questions.
When collecting feedback, you should be completely open to any opinions and observations that your customers feel are important enough to share. Limiting participants to multiple choice answers or rating systems really restricts the depth and range of answers you will get. If there is space, leave a field free for the user to provide any other information they think you should know. This “wildcard” field is invaluable for learning. And what you don’t know you don’t know. Survey tools like SurveyMonkey and Typeform make it easy to embed a link to your survey right in your email. These services also store all of your responses for you to review and analyze.
Create a feedback collection on your website
Some companies don’t just want customer feedback – they need customer feedback. Maybe you’re a design, marketing, branding agency, or freelancer, and you need specific feedback on a project you’re working on for a client. If your business is like ours and absolutely depends on your customers’ collaboration, you should facilitate the feedback process.
For example, at Crowdspring, we create customer feedback tools directly on our website. In our design and naming projects, clients can leave specific feedback directly to the creative or designer on each application. On all our design projects, from logo design to product design, customers (and
contributors) can contextually connect their feedback to specific areas of the design.
And when a client chooses a winning design (or name), they can easily communicate with your creative in a dedicated checkout area. Additionally, clients, including agency clients, can use our free focus group tool to get feedback on designs from clients, prospects, friends, and colleagues quickly and easily. Our agency clients have an additional feedback tool available – our client introduction tool. This allows agency clients to present selected design entries from a project to their client on a custom whitelisted mini-site.
This mini-site is optimized to make feedback on each design simple and fast. Everyone can see all comments on one convenient platform. If your business depends on customer collaboration and feedback, embed the process directly on your website. So you and your customers can access all relevant information, materials, and feedback in one place.
