10 Best Practices to Build your eCommerce Customer Service

 

The eCommerce industry is highly dependent on its customers. Whosoever succeeds in providing the best customer experience wins the race. In fact, the Walker Study shows that the customer experience is going to surpass the importance of quality and product pricing for customers in choosing a brand.

Thus, keeping your customers happy and providing them the best online customer service can be your best bet to beat the eCommerce competition.

So are you ready to find out what are the best practices that will help you build a strong online customer service system to win the hearts of your customers? Let’s find out.

10 Powerful Online Customer Service Strategies To Be The Best In The Market 1. Track your customers’ journey

The first step towards building your eCommerce customer service would be to understand how your customers act online.

Tracking and understanding your customer’s complete shopping journey would help you identify the touchpoints you’ll want to work on.

However, each customer’s journey is different. You may create your own buyers’ personas to understand your audience in a better way.

For example, if you consider your audience to be mostly teenagers and young adults, their journey might be starting from the social media ads that you might be running.

You may also make use of tools like Google Analytics to track how much time your customers spend on your website, where they click, and which page of your website is widely used by them.

You may set up your online customer service system on social channels, emails, your website, depending on how your customers are engaging with you.

If you see most of your customers bouncing away at the checkout page, you might want to optimize it or talk to your customers about what issue they’re facing when landing on the checkout page.

2. Create an omnichannel strategy

There’s nothing like a seamless customer experience and omnichannel strategy just allows you to do that.

“Now, what is an omnichannel strategy in eCommerce?” I hear you shout. Let me explain.

Omnichannel strategy is the integration of all the platforms where the customers land during their online shopping journey. This includes emails, social media platforms, webpages, and all the different devices that shoppers use to reach you.

While providing an omnichannel experience to your customers, they shouldn’t experience any hassle in between. What they look for on their tablet should easily appear in the social media ads while using their mobile phones. If they reach your site by phone, it shouldn’t be hard to check out from their desktop. (Obviously, all this must be made possible, given that the customer is using the same email address on all his/her devices)

This strategy works amazingly in aiding the customer in a hassle-free online shopping experience and working as a seamless customer support system.

3. Make use of chatbots

Chatbots are smart, trendy, and useful in eCommerce. They take a lot of loads off from your online customer service team.

You can utilize chatbots in answering some frequently asked queries. This not only prevents customers from unnecessary calls and emails but also helps them in making quick buying decisions.

Using chatbots ultimately leads to the quick resolution of queries and higher conversions in sales.

4. Set up a live chat support system

Live Chat Support has innumerable benefits. I’ll name a few:

1. Adds a Human Touch
2. Real-time engagement
3. More conversions
4. An easy way of collecting customer data
5. Real-time selling, suggesting, and upselling
6. Saves Time
7. Enables multiple customers handling at once
8. Saves Cost
9. Tracing and tracking of communication results in personalized service
10. Analytical reports generation
11. Easy surveys
12. Automated greetings and the spottable pop-up box

 

You can read more in-depth about Live Chat Support in eCommerce through our attached blog link.

5. Build an excellent customer support team

Having a strong, humble, and helpful online customer service team is all that matters in the end. When everything else fails, your human team is what is going to assist your customers.

If your online customer service team fails to resolve your customers’ queries, your business might end up in a bad shape. You need to make sure that your support team is:

• Providing timely support
• Polite while answering
• Giving accurate and correct answers
• Well-informed about the company and products
• Taking formal feedbacks for queries assisted

Such practices can highly improve your online customer service area to retain customers along with earning new ones.

6. Leverage customer feedback

There are majorly 6 reasons why I would suggest you start taking the customer feedback now:

1. Reveal the Areas of Improvement
2. Builds a Healthy Relationship
3. Improves the Conversion Rate
4. Improves Business Status
5. Higher Purchase Rate Through Real-Time Solution
6. Helps in Locating Influencers

Taking customer feedback helps your online business to expand in the right direction along with developing a pleasant customer experience with your business.

Don’t be afraid to take feedbacks. Negative or positive, both are highly important to boost your online business growth.

7. Relieve customer pain points

In my opinion, customer pain points are simply the problems that the buyers go through which they believe would be solved by buying a product. Thus, when they face some issues, they turn to shop.

For example, if a customer struggles with oily skin, she’d turn to oil control cleansers. Similarly, if a customer struggles with less bedroom space, he’d buy a compact bed, foldable tables, and other products to save the space.

There are 5 key customer pain points which if you relieve, you may experience a great boost in your sales:

1. Financial pain point
2. Convenience pain point
3. Website pain points
4. Hidden fees and expensive shipping
5. Customer service pain points

To understand and learn more about these pain points, I’d highly recommend you read “Relieving These 5 critical Customer Pain Points Will Boost Your Growth Online”.

8. Automate the necessary things

You may consider that the more you involve, the better you’ll be able to serve your customers. However, that’s not always true. Sometimes it’s much better to leave the things on automation to avoid human errors.

For example, you may automate the order status, invoicing, sharing of welcome and order completion mails, sharing of newsletters with offer details, and notifications can easily eliminate the need of having a dedicated person doing things.

You must be having hundreds of customers and a human employee may forget to share timely status with all of them. Sharing incorrect details also becomes a possibility.

Thus, automating such a few things can help you be more relaxed and provide accurate customer support to all your customers.

9. Provide in-app support features

Statistics show that more than 50% of the users use their mobile phones to make the purchase.

Customers prefer using the app to buy things online as it’s quicker and easier. Hence, it’s very important to provide in-app support to the customers. It could be FAQs, chat, price comparisons, and everything that can make online shopping a breeze for your customers.

10. Provide clear, correct, and multiple contact options

Providing multiple options to contact your eCommerce store is a good way to let customers reach you no matter what. This gives satisfaction to your customers as they can reach you in all ways such as through different numbers, email, social channels, and more.

However, it’s vital that the information given is completely correct and in existence. Make sure that all your toll-free numbers are working and email addresses are active.

Conclusion

Customer support is one of the most important areas for running an eCommerce business. Poor customer support directly affects your customer satisfaction level which ultimately affects your sales and overall growth.

Most eCommerce startups fail for lacking online customer service quality. There are several ways in which you can build your eCommerce customer support.

 

I have given an overview of what measures you can take to improve your online customer service. Also, I have attached some useful links in case you’ll like to read more about the topics mentioned above.

 

Can you think of any other ways to build online customer service? Did you like the suggestion I mentioned here? Do let me know in the comments.