Thanks to the internet and social media, more people than ever before can interact with your brand. This means more visibility, sales, and customers.
However, the same goes for every company, meaning you’ve got no room for error in terms of customer service.
If you give your customers a bad experience, they’ll leave you and walk right into the open arms of one of your competitors – something you clearly want to avoid.
Consequently, exceptional eCommerce customer support should be the root of your business.
Aim to satisfy and delight your customers, and your sales will thank you.
What is Ecommerce Customer Support?
Ecommerce customer support is the assistance you provide to your customers as an online business. It begins with the initial purchase decision and continues throughout the entire customer lifecycle with your brand.
Research has shown that even a single bad experience can cause 76% of consumers not to do business with a competitor. So, if you want to avoid customer churn, you’ll need to keep a close eye on all aspects of your support.
How can Customer Support Improve Your Ecommerce Performance?
Excellent customer support isn’t just an option for your business. It is necessary, as it shows your customers how much you value them and that you’re about doing business with them. Furthermore, it helps create (ideally) a positive brand image, promoting trust, loyalty, and word-of-mouth recommendations.
Let’s have a closer look at some of the amazing benefits proper eCommerce customer support can give you.
Increase Your Sales
Your customers will love to do business with you if they know you can be trusted to deliver on your promises. Solving their problems when they reach out and always being there when they need your services goes a long way in increasing your sales.
Improve Brand Image
Your brand image is the experience that comes to mind when your customers think about your business. You want to ensure that whatever experience they recall is positive, and a good way to achieve that is by investing in your eCommerce customer support.
Amazing eCommerce customer support improves your brand image and increases the trust of your customers in your business. However, a healthy brand image requires the accumulation of consistently positive experiences.
Reduce Customer Churn
The simple fact is that your customers will leave your business if they become dissatisfied with the services you offer. But your goal shouldn’t be just to keep them from leaving. Instead, focus on getting them excited enough to share the good word about your brand.
7 Best Practices for successful eCommerce Customer Support
Customer support is not just about providing great services – it’s about winning your customers’ trust. People don’t care how much you know if they don’t feel you care. Prioritize their happiness above all else, and they’ll appreciate it.
Customer support should be strategic to yield the best result. Here are some practices that can help you do that.
1. Build an Omnichannel Strategy
Ecommerce requires you always to be able to reach your audience. This could be done through a virtual call center, on social media, via a chatbot on your website, or through other online platforms. It’s vital to diversify your online process equally across the various channels to ensure that, wherever your customers are, they can always reach you.
But your work doesn’t involve setting up an online presence or profile. Inactivity can only harm your reputation, so it’s crucial you invest resources in keeping up with your audience’s messages, comments, questions, and concerns.
2. Automate Your Processes
The efficiency of your customer service is key to having excellent eCommerce customer support. A surefire way to achieve maximum efficiency is through automation. It improves the efficiency of your eCommerce customer support and comes in handy in many areas, such as invoicing, inventory management, and customer reviews.
Leveraging automation includes having customized replies for FAQs, recurring customer problems and inquiries, integrating chatbots as well as employing automated CRM software. This allows you to ease the burden of handling every call, question, and challenge manually and instead allows your employees to focus on what they do best.
3. Be Quick
33% of customers are most frustrated by having to wait on hold and having to repeat themselves to multiple support reps. Your customers do not have all day to spend trying to solve a problem. They will view it as unprofessional when they reach out, and their issues are transferred to several service agents where they have to repeat themselves before receiving a solution.
That’s why you need to train your customer support to handle challenges as quickly as possible. Incorporating a dedicated call center for ecommerce into your customer support strategy can significantly enhance response times and streamline issue resolution. This commitment to efficiency not only addresses customer concerns promptly but also contributes to a positive and professional image of your brand in the eyes of your customers
4. Allow Self-Service
The tricky thing about customer support is that it deals with humans. And as we all know, humans can often be unpredictable. Some customers like to reach out to a brand representative at the first hint of trouble, while others prefer to solve their issues themselves.
To account for these individual needs, consider incorporating self-service into your operations.
Self-service gives your customers a working knowledge of the product or service they use.
Educating your customers about the products and services you offer them is an excellent customer support tip. When your customers are informed about the product and its applications, they feel more comfortable talking to other people about your business.
It reduces the workload on your customer support team
Your customers can easily sort out some challenges if only they have access to the right self-service tools they need. Self-service options, such as a chatbot on your eCommerce website weeds out minor challenges for the customer support team, enabling them to focus on tasks requiring greater attention, thereby increasing their productivity.
5. Personalize Your Support
Every customer has unique needs, and a good customer service tip is to ensure that those unique needs are fulfilled just the way your customers want them to be. Personalization means relating with your customers as actual humans with individual desires and not just a group of people with “related” needs.
Formalities are vital in customer service; however, it is very important to balance professionalism with personalization. Personalization helps you to retain that human touch and connection while providing your services as a business.
6. Ask for Feedback Every Time
Asking your customers for feedback helps you improve your business and services. Your customers are the ones on the receiving end of your business and have the most information regarding the actual user experience.
Besides informational purposes, asking your customers for feedback helps them feel included in the decision-making process of the business and increases their trust in your brand. You can set up surveys that your customers can quickly fill out and questions they can answer, but do not bore them with lots of questions as they’ll become averse to your questioning.
7. Measure Results
Measuring your results over time helps you know how much growth you’ve recorded, where you need to improve, and where you need to optimize as a business. This is especially helpful with the use of data from your customers’ touch points, conversations, and preferences.
As a business, certain actions will give rise to definite effects, and a good way to study your business is to take note of these. Try asking specific questions like:
- Are our customers pleased with our services so far?
- What is the rate of customer retention in our business over the last six months?
- What percentage of customer churn have we experienced, and why did we experience such?
Wrapping Up
Your customer service is a major determinant as to whether your eCommerce business will thrive or fall like a pack of cards. Your customers have high expectations, as well as other businesses calling for them. Securing your market share will require you to go above and beyond with your customer support.
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Matej Mešár is a copywriter with a journalistic background based out of Bratislava, Slovakia. Currently, he has his sights set on the SaaS sphere. He works for CloudTalk, helping to create compelling messaging in support of the next generation of cloud communication.
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