When most people start an eCommerce business, they think about their product development, marketing, shipping, and other crucial stuff. But they ignore customer service - the one thing that can turn a visitor into a customer, and a customer into a returning customer.
But what’s the need when you’re offering great products and discounts?
According to a report, 80% of businesses believe they provide excellent customer service, but only 8% of customers agree.
There is a considerable gap between these numbers, and this gap can make or break your success online.
So when there’s so much to do when you’re running an eCommerce business, how do you ensure great customer support, and eventually an awesome shopping experience with your brand?
Learning from the others in the industry.
Efficient customer service will bore you the fruits of not just a good reputation or brand name, but also sales. There is no one size fits all approach here but some best practices can go a long way making things simpler for you too!
Pre-purchase anxiety is real and when it hits, your visitor wants immediate responses.
If you want to deliver excellent customer service on time, you need to create templates that don't seem like templates. But your customer is smart, and if you reply to them with a basic and usual template, they will know.
Avoid such situations by having loads of templates for different types of responses ready. They should look as if your service agent writes them in real time.
You must create templates for these fundamental issues:
- Shipping Issues
- Return and refunds
- Discounts or coupon codes
- Damaged product
- Product related queries
51% of companies use at least eight channels to communicate with their customers. So why not offer as many when it comes to customer support and service as well.
Creating a multichannel help desk essentially means letting the customer decide which channel they want to reach out to you. But it also means bringing all your conversations onto one dashboard so that you can easily manage them.
As an eCommerce store, you must have burning customer questions added to the FAQ section. Having relevant questions will reduce the number of incoming tickets. Having FAQs also suggests that you know your customer well enough and have thought about them as well.
Include more questions on topics such as regarding return policy, refunds, shipping details, and payment details.
Even better, integrate them with your eCommerce live chat solution like TextChat so that you can automate some responses.
Reduce time and let your customers decide what they need help with? Self-service options are few ready to answer queries in your live-chat box.
Your customers can know more about your return policies, managing or tracking the order, and payments by simply selecting the same from the menu you build out. Because sometimes, it takes a little nudge to get them to check out the FAQ section.
The main issue with using an outdated platform is it doesn't integrate with other accessible tools. So when a ticket arrives related to any order, your customer support team will be switching through multiple databases to find the customer details.
To avoid such mishaps you should have a help desk that integrates among other platforms as well. In this way you can save the time of your support and customer both.
Yes, you have included all information on your storefront. But at times, a website visitor may choose to reach out to you and ask about a product or a variant’s availability.
In this case, you want to turn their intent into a purchase. So make sure you have inventory data readily available. For this, you may want to integrate your inventory management solution with your live chat solution.
Are you listening to your customers and what they need help with? Social media is an excellent source of customer feedback on the online store. Using omnichannel help desk software will let you handle and track social media queries.
Sometimes the best support is given by joining in the conversation. Alternatively, you can also make use of a social listening tool.
You can write swift, personalized responses when you have direct integrations with the order management, your store platform, inventory management, and shipping software. The goal is to make the customer feel like you’re having a conversation with them, instead of just responding to a question.
Having an omnichannel support desk is crucial for any eCommerce store. It will offer you a unified view of every customer when an agent can see all orders, opened tickets, outstanding orders, and any customer comments.
Your live chat solution or customer support solution, should give you an overview of all the conversations. This way, if required, you can also jump into a conversation and address queries.
There are different types of customer queries that come in. While some request customer support regarding an existing order, others may be more sales oriented, wanting to know how best they can make the purchase. To be able to manage all questions efficiently, you need to have an automated way of assigning and redirecting messages based on the type of question.
So when someone wants to know about their order, you can redirect questions to support. On the other hand, if someone asks for a variant size’s availability, you can direct them to sales! Having a live chat solution like TextChat, helps you do this easily.
The one thing about customer support and service is timeliness. But to be able to respond to customer queries in a timely manner, you need to get notified in real-time as well.
By real-time notifications, we mean getting an alert on either email or text that lets you know someone has reached out to you. The more instantaneous your notification is, the more accessible you can be and the faster you can get to responding to the customer’s questions.
With TextChat, we have made this more efficient. We have combined the power of live chat and text messages. This means that when a customer reaches out to you, you get notified by text message along with a quick-to-join link that can be opened in a browser and used to have a conversation with that online shopper.
Metrics are a huge part of the success of your e-commerce store. There are a lot of customer service metrics you can track to gauge the performance. Average response time, converted tickets, average resolution time, and social media comments are some of the metrics that you must track.
Live chat solutions like TextChat come with an easy to understand analytics dashboard that lets you see if all the efforts have been adding up towards the end goal - your sales.
Small teams can't run their support system 24/7. Also, it is not that every query has a satisfactory templated response.
You don't want to leave any wrong impression by not attending them during off-hours. So you need to send them an automated response and collect their email addresses or phone numbers. This way you can address their queries whenever your support team is working the next day.
Pro tip: Always set your availability; that way you set the expectations right at the start! You can do this with live chat solutions like TextChat with ease.
You probably did not see this coming. But the thing is that when your store visitors see your logo in the widget, they half expect to get an automated response. Most of these visitors, seeing the same, will not even bother dropping you a message - after all, a chatbot can’t really help them (or so they think).
Replacing your logo or customizing your live chat widget by adding headshots of yourself or the team that is managing live chat (live agents) can encourage conversations.
Talking about encouraging a conversation - it is also a good practice to add a welcome popup on your live chat widget. This is a great way to let a store visitor know that you’re around if they need anything.
A simple message like “Hey, we’re around to help you make the best purchase. Let us know if you need any help!” can get a lot of visitors to reach out to you.
Customer service for an eCommerce store is crucial. 32% of customers will walk away from any brand they love after a single bad experience. And half such cases typically include support and service related concerns.
However, 86% of customers are ready to pay more for a refined customer experience. If you get this right, it can result in high cart values and of course, a lot of word of mouth marketing for your business.
Customer service is a focal point for ultimate sales. It’s not just about answering questions, but addressing purchase anxiety that can get internet users to actually interact with you in a meaningful manner.
And TextChat is a live chat solution that is making it easier for you to implement these customer support best practices.
Don’t believe us? Get started with a free trial today.
