Do you know what customers expect from online shopping? It is not always delivery time or prices, but prime customer service. They want to get involved with a company that provides high-quality customer service.
Customers do not buy a product but experience comes with customer service.
For a persistent change of expectations, nowadays, customer service has become a complex work.
As an eCommerce business owner, your customer service should be a number one priority to tie your customers and gain new ones. You need to deliver delightful customer service to build continual relationships with your customers.
The quality of customer service is a crucial indicator of a company’s long-term success. Gartner’s research reveals that 89% of companies compete with rivals based on customer service.
Also, according to research from PWC, 86% of customers are willing to pay more to experience excellent customer service.
What is eCommerce Customer Service?
Customer service is an act of providing or taking care of customer service, including their needs, requirements, etc. to customers before, during, and after a purchase. It is very disappointing that only 12% of customers believe that a company provides good customer service, according to a study by HubSpot.
From choosing a strategy to attitudes toward clients, customer service plays a huge role in doing business. Thus, as a company, you should invest in customer service if you want to succeed and grow your business.
Why Should We Care for Customer Service?
Customer service implemented on eCommerce has four essential advantages, according to a study carried by EasyShip. It turned out that the quality of customer service has a long-term impact on a company’s overall success by:
- Improving e-commerce trust;
- Popularizing brand;
- Overclassing other competitors;
- Helping marketing campaign;
- Increasing conversion rates.
When a company’s customer service is quite satisfying, it gains loyal customers. Once they experience your customer-centric strategy, they will keep coming back. Customer-centric strategy, in its simplest form, is to put customers’ needs, wants, and more at the center of the buying process.
Let’s put this into practice.
#1 Apply Multichannel approach
The multichannel approach of customer service means there is more than one way for customers to reach out for a company’s support. More than 75% of customers utilize more than one channel.
In brief, a multichannel support system allows e-Commerce customers to meet you on the channel they prefer. This channel can be phone calls, emails, live chat, social media, etc., or lightweight self-service options such as a knowledge base.
Also, a channel preference differs from one generation to another i.e. older people prefer phone calls, whereas the younger generation chooses social media. Thus, depending on your product or service, you need to consider your target audience when applying the support channel.
#2 Retain Customers with Your Knowledge
Did you know that 91% of site visitors continue to use the site if there is enough information that meets their needs?
The reason is that customers want to save their time. Visitors want quick access to their desired information. That’s the point.
The knowledge base is one of the customer service strategies that includes FAQ, policies, product details, etc. Put all the information about your company or product in one place for faster customer service.
Take an example of PayPal. They own an online community platform that is full of user experience-based answers. Besides the availability of information, they are organized in a way that it is easy to find a topic or solution.
PayPal has over 285 million customers all over the world. Its knowledge base availability can be the reason that it has so many customers. Both business or personal users perceive that if anything goes wrong, they can easily find resolutions.
To achieve high-quality self-service, you need to use modern solutions to analyze and measure the value of your content. This can be customer behavior tracker tools, i.e., Hotjar or other customer metrics.
#3 Offer Instant Help
According to research in the U.S, 53% of adult customers abandon their online purchase if they do not find a quick answer to their questions. Live chat is the fastest-growing channel in the customer service sphere. Quick resolution is the main reason for a customer to prefer a phone call or live chat over email or fax.
Besides improving the quality of customer service, and providing immediate resolutions for customers, live chats help to increase conversion rates. How?
Live chat, for instance, pop up chat windows can help visitors immediate assistance from the help desk. If a customer is stuck on a certain page for a long time, pop up chats can ease their doubts about a product. Some companies, such as Paldesk, offer live chat software for online business owners to increase conversion rates.
According to research by Loudhouse, nearly 60% of customers prefer communication via phone calls since it is the quickest way for problem resolution. Other than real-time chats and phone calls, live video chats are on the rise when it comes to seeking live assistance, too, according to research. 55% of the surveyed participants are interested in video chats.
#4 Provide Kind and Personalized Experience
Did you know that the friendliness of representatives or agents is one of the essential aspects of customer service experience? Studies show that, after a speed of resolution and response, customers look for friendliness in communication with representatives.
The study shows that in the U.S 79% and the U.K, 70% of the customers want brands to provide a personalized experience. How can you use that technique?
Concept of personalization differs for each person. Some of the customers like receiving special discount emails while others are seeing popup offers with the touch of personalization based on their customer profile and behavior i.e., their customer sessions, names, last visited page or product, etc. You can achieve personalization through the following tips:
- Remember what a customer purchased previously, and refer to it in your next conversation;
- Address customers with their names;
- Communicate with them in a more personalized way by tracking a customer’s behavior.
This list can grow longer, and you can add more using your creativity and experience. It is better to optimize your collected data and offer personalization experience accordingly.
#5 Ask for Feedback – How Was Their Experience?
Asking for feedback for your online service is a simple yet powerful tool for improving eCommerce customer service.
This technique – asking “how was your experience?” works like magic at boosting customer service satisfaction. Do you know why?
Users want to feel cared. No one would like to cooperate with a company when its purpose is only to make money. None of us would give value to this kind of company, do we?
When you ask that question, customers perceive that you care for them, for your service, and would want to improve yourself. And this leaves a positive message in the customers’ minds. Let’s look at GoDaddy – one of the well-known Internet domain registrar and web hosting companies.
GoDaddy offers a 7/24 contact service consisting of a phone call and online chat. At the end of every chat, they ask to evaluate the service.
Also, GoDaddy often modifies their online chat. Only a couple of months ago, you would wait up to 5 minutes for an agent to be online. 5 minutes is quite short and considered to be a good amount of time to wait for customer reps.
However, despite its quick online chat service before, it’s changed in a way that you do not wait even a minute. Once you start a chat, based on the keyword you’ve typed in the box, you’re offered with the most related help articles. In case you don’t find the articles helpful, an agent connects, and they are ready to answer your questions. Attentive behavior toward its users can be the reason for GoDaddy having more than 18 million customers all over the world?
Also, beware of the unhappy customers who want to get the resolution of their problem ASAP and the toughest client questions.
5 Customer Service Tools To Provide An Excellent Experience
Online Communities
Online or virtual community is what company provides its customers with a participatory experience where they can exchange their ideas, give feedback, interact with each other, and more. By building an online community, you overthrow all the borders and create an environment that makes your customers feel valued.
Did you know that almost 49% of companies save 10% to 25% of expenses annually by building online communities?
One of the glorious examples of companies using the internet community is Starbucks. Its online community, called My Starbucks Idea offers its coffee admirers to share their ideas, feedback, and votes.
In this context, Starbucks shows how much its customers’ ideas are worth to them and how significant they are.
It will help if you use your creativity while establishing online communities. For instance, Xbox Ambassadors provide its customers with Twitch shows, Youtube videos and tutorials, and forums. For an active working online community, you can analyze your customers, their preferences by making online surveys, polls, Q&A sessions, and more.
Facebook Groups
Facebook is one of the ideal ways to grow your business – you can advertise, sell, and contact your customers. With the Facebook support group, your customers can easily get in touch with you, share their ideas and feedback.
You can create weekly Q&A sessions with the help of Facebook group features such as polls, threads, quizzes, live Q&A sessions, etc., to support and help your customers.
Besides customer care, you can leverage Facebook groups to drive more traffic to your eCommerce store.
Launching a Facebook group, inviting friends, and annoying them with your store’s link should not be your goal. You need to provide value to your customers.
It will be the best if you create an environment for them to experience the unique difference between your company and many others out in the market. It is where your creativity should come to your help. Implement the following tips:
- Let your customers know they are special. There are many ways to do so; for instance, you can invite only customers who have purchased your product or service; or, you can invite the ones who have added your product in their wishlist, etc.
- Discuss current trends. By doing so, you can show that your company is well-aware of events and trends in the industry.
- Ask for feedback, suggestions, and complaints. By sharing their expectations, suggestions, customers will engage with your brand that leads generations.
Self-service Knowledge Base
Knowledge base is like an online library that offers valuable information about your product. This can include e-books, blog, academy, FAQ pages, video tutorials, and more.
In fact, 91% of the customers prefer self-service if there is available information that meets their demand.
According to customer service statistics, 73% of the customers want to resolve issues by themselves. They do not want to contact customer service in the first place. Your company needs to deliver a knowledge base service for better customer satisfaction. Knowledge base self-service allows customers to find answers by themselves, and get to know the products better.
Social Media Profiles
When it comes to customers, your provision of service needs to be diversified. Customers are different in their preferences for contact. Thus, you need to create social profiles, depending on your customers’ behavior.
Social channels offer customers to contact, rate, give feedback or complain, or just mention your company.
According to the Institute of Customer Service, 1 in every 3 customers turn to social media first when they need to seek support or communication with a company.
To get the most from the social media customer service, you need to know where your customers are – which channel they prefer. You should analyze which platform your customers prefer. Depending on your product or service, your channels need to focus on a particular audience. Most of the companies prefer Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Linkedin, while some focus on Youtube and Pinterest.
Live chats
Customers want to get a quick answer to their question, and a fast solution to their problems. Live chats are one of the ideal customer service tools to provide the quickest communication for eCommerce businesses.
Instant help and solution is a leading way to keep your customers satisfied, and it is the reason why people prefer to live chat over other contact channels.
In fact, live chat support during checkout processes increases conversion rates.
There has been much research about the correlation between the existence of live chat and an increase in revenues.
As an example, Goinflow reveals that there is an increase in conversion rates of about 3.84% and a 6% overall increase in revenues.
There are several Shopify, WordPress, BigCommerce, etc. live chat plugins that make it easy to add it to your website. Before, including live chats, you should consider the following questions:
- On which pages should you install live chat? In this case, you should consider which pages you get the most traffic, and which page may generate more leads.
- Who will communicate with your customers? Chatbots are helpful for the first interaction with the customers, but not for further communication. Since customers prefer personalized support, you need to hire individuals to take care of your customers.
In brief, by including live chat to your eCommerce store, you can:
- Provide the fastest customer care;
- Deliver a better customer experience;
- Increase your online store revenues and sales.
Wrapping up
Working with thousands of people, in our experience, we’ve seen that customer satisfaction is the number one cornerstone for building a successful business. Nextsale puts the customer first. Our response rate is less than 5 minutes and that can be as low as 3 minutes. Resolving our customers’ problems in the fastest way is one of the distinctive features of Nextsale in the market. Also, you can see from our Shopify reviews that we always reply to our customers with a positive attitude and give gratitude for choosing Nextsale.
