Ecommerce Customer Service Best Practices
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As we know, the consumer is king. Every successful E-Commerce business can attribute a large part of its success to customer satisfaction, especially in E-commerce. These return customers are what make most businesses their main dollars. While a company is small manual processing of orders and customer service is okay, but as the business grows, it is near impossible to handle it manually. With growing competition, businesses need to keep up with the rest of the market. But how can smaller E-Commerce businesses compete with the likes of Amazon and Uber without burning a hole in their pockets? Let's find out!
- Customer service is a key component in maintaining excellent customer satisfaction. All E-commerce giants offer excellent customer service to their customers. As your company grows, ensuring great service manually becomes next to impossible, and automation becomes a must.
- Self-service systems have emerged as the leading method for resolving customer queries. Features like AI-chat boxes allow for 24x7 support even when your customer service team may be offline.
- It's essential to make the customer feel special and provide personalized support. Providing multi-lingual support and extending channels for communication through various platforms are some of the ways to ensure the same.
- Feedback from customers is a great avenue to gather information on the business's shortcomings and should be seriously considered while making executive decisions and changes in the company.
- With regards to your team, it's always better to create an environment of empowerment and empathy.
- Giving each customer support agent great powers empowers the agent and avoids the transfer of calls, which is a major turnoff for most customers.
Ecommerce Customer Service Best Practices
There are some of the ecommerce customer service best practices which make companies like Amazon and Uber special.
- Faster Resolution with Self Service
- 24/7 Customer Support
- Personalized Support
- Multi-Channel Customer support
- Clarity with Return Policy
- Structured Knowledge Base
- Collect Customer Feedback and Implement it to grow
- Monitor Team Performance
- Multi-Language support
- Avoid Transferring Customers From Agent to Agent
Let's dig into deeper,
1. Provide Faster Resolution with Self Service
Gone are the days when every problem was raised directly to customer support. With the advent of Self-service, customers feel more empowered, while companies cut costs on employment while bumping up customer satisfaction metrics. Amazon and Uber are great examples of how customers can track orders, refunds, returns, and complaints without needing the assistance of customer services. With over 90% of customers expecting or preferring to have an online portal for raising objections or inquiries, every business's need to adapt is necessary, for being left behind might have serious repercussions for the business.
Also, over 80% of all consumers expect their problems to be resolved instantaneously, making redundant call-in service center structures. Most businesses don't have the financial backbone to build an entire customer self service system. But you can always try out something like Richpanel. Richpanel allows companies to provide their customers with all-in-one personalized dashboards to track orders, check order details, previous orders, and refund and return status. All this at a cost that won't break the bank. Signup for Free
2. Provide 24/7 Customer Support
With 64% of customers preferring customer service through the 24/7 chatbox features, its become a must for every business to have some form of 24/7 customer assistance. Having a 24/7 customer service team to answer calls is highly capital and labor-intensive and not viable for every business owner. It's not only enough to have great customer satisfaction but also to provide improved average response times. This is where Chat-box integration comes in. The common misconception is you need your team to be online 24/7 for a chat box to work around the clock. Learn more on Live chat for Ecommerce
With the advent of AI automated chat boxes, customers can raise queries while your customer support team sleeps. With Richpanel, businesses can set up their own branded chat boxes integrated into their customer service platform to provide their customers with better real-time assistance without hiring labor around the clock. This is one of the most essential e-commerce customer service qualities to help your business stand out from the crowd.
3. Provide Personalized Support
A recent report shows that 66 percent of consumers believe customer service is the biggest spending motivator. Every person wants to feel special, and the same applies to every customer. A personalized experience while online shopping is what giant E-commerce companies have mastered. A part of that online shopping experience is also that of customer service. E-Commerce Business often tries to offer lower prices, bundle deals, and sell a more extensive variety, a simple way to outlast the competition is by simply treating your customers better.
Research shows that 55% percent of customers are willing to pay more if they believe that the business provides great customer service. Personalized dashboards for each customer and live-chat boxes that welcome customers as they enter the site exemplify how a business can make a customer 'cared-about'. Learn More on Ways to Create Ecommerce Cus
4. Provide Multi-Channel Customer support
With growing platforms for E-commerce, such as Instagram and Whatsapp, the need for increasing media to address issues has also become a must. Visibility is not only excellent for selling but also support. Having different channels for customer support helps reach a broader audience that may not want to jump on another platform to raise a query. Older customers often prefer E-mail or Calling over Instagram or Whatsapp; thus, not meeting their needs often leads to isolation and drop-off of that specific customer base.
5. Clarity with Return Policy
There is nothing more off-putting for customers than being misled. This means that the customer won't return and will most likely tell friends and family not to shop at your site or write a scathing review. One of the most significant pivot points for customers is Return and Refund policies. It's essential to know your bottom line before you can issue a clear Return and Refund policy. It's best to have a link at the bottom of your page regarding retund and refund policy. It's even better if, under each product, its return and refund cycle is listed. If a product is not returnable or refundable, caution should be raised to the customer before they buy.
Recommended Reading: How to Reduce Ecommerce Return Rates: Statistics and Best Practices
6. Create a Knowledge Base
Knowledge bases refer to a library of articles and information about products, services, and FAQs made available to consumers to help them resolve issues and make informed purchases. Among all self-service options, customers prefer knowledge bases the most. Knowledge bases are not only the fastest option when it comes to resolving issues for customers but also possibly the minor capital intensive. This is especially true, as maximum tickets and Chats deal with recurring questions that a simple article or write-up an answer. Customers like to be empowered, and this, in turn, helps the company's bottom line.
7. Gather Customer Feedback and Implement it to grow
Failure is the stepping stone to success. The only way to learn is to fail. The whole theory of self-learning AI is based on customer feedback and failures. These principles are adopted by all top e-commerce companies such as Amazon and Ali-baba. These customer feedback help to improve your operations organically. Numbers don't always tell the entire story. Customer feedback and criticism should be welcomed and if possible, constructively resolved. Using platforms such as Twitter help to directly converse and deal with complaints in a public forum, which builds public confidence in the brand/business. Solving these problems shouldn't only be a mere PR stunt but should also be dealt with in such a manner that similar problems don't arise again.
8. Monitor Team Performance - Build Empathy
any around empathy, rewards, excitement, and team effort is essential.47 Million Americans left their job; an event coined the the great resignation. Many analysts believe the reason was more geared towards work environment and job satisfaction. It's important for companies to look at their employees as humans and not as investments. Building your company around empathy, rewards, excitement, and team effort is essential.
It's necessary to make your employees feel that they are valued, unique, and not just a cog in a vast corporate machine. Providing your employees with benefits and having a psychiatrist on deck is a great way to show you care. This improves employee retention, loyalty, and even productivity.
9. Provide Multi-Language support for Multilingual Ecommerce Store
Just like branching out on different platforms for customer support to reach customers where they are comfortable, it's also essential to provide support in other languages. In most countries worldwide, they are more than two languages spoken by their inhabitants.
There is nothing more personalized than support in a language that is native to your customer in personalization. It allows you to reach a broader customer base and provide more intuitive UX and help build a bond where the consumer feels that his tradition and language are respected. This helps to build brand loyalty in customers.
Protein Works is an excellent example of operating in 10+ languages has allowed them to scale to 50+ countries while reducing their tickets issued by over 50% every year.
Richpanel not only recognises more than 52 languages, it helps you provide support in popular languages like French, and Japanese. The advantage Richpanel has over other ecommerce customer service software is that it also allows your agents to operate in their native language, making it easier to find the right talent without a language barrier.
10. Avoid Transferring Customers From Agent to Agent
66% of customers rate being put on hold and being transferred from one customer service agent to another as the most annoying part of consumer service. Customer satisfaction is key. If a problem-solving mechanism becomes a problem in itself, it's redundant. That's why it's essential to make sure customer service is handled in a seamless and hassle-free fashion while keeping the average response time as low as possible. Keeping wait times under a minute is a great place to ensure excellent customer service.
It's also important to empower each customer service agent to make various decisions so that there isn't a need to keep transferring the customer to higher management.
How does good Customer Service look Like?
Customer Service refers to the support you provide to your customer before, during, and after buying your service or product. This can be in the form of helping in finding the right product, helping with any queries about the product and warranty, and providing them with expected delivery time, variety in payment channels, delivery, and all the way to refund and returns.
Amazon and Uber are two great examples of how customers can raise any query/ ticket about a product or service without connecting to a customer representative over the call. Most great customer services have great intuitive UI, with most things being streamlined and automated. These reasons and many more combine to give them great customer service and Customer Loyalty.
Conclusion
Now that you know all about the top eCommerce customer service Best practices followed by the leading companies, it's your turn. Follow this eCommerce customer service checklist to make sure your business sees tremendous growth in the future. But before that, you will need a little help building that online customer service infrastructure.
Richpanel provides you with customized customer service tools for a personalized experience for your business and valuable customers. Set up your free account today.
