Five easy, actionable e-commerce customer service tips to keep your customers happy, responsive and coming back for more.
With e-commerce customer service, plenty of tactics and approaches might seem like common sense. But there are many tangible, actionable things you can do to make your customer service better and easier, as reported in Groove Blog. Here are five of them:
1. Use an appropriate email inbox
Firstly, you want your staff to share an inbox. If your customers send their communication to an inbox that all of your staff can see, it makes it easier for everyone to check who has – and hasn’t yet – received an appropriate response.
You should also make sure this inbox is fully integrated with your site, so every customer has a profile which displays recent purchases and links to chats. And know how that customer interacted (was it via email? via Facebook?), so that you can respond via the appropriate platform.
Your priority here is ensuring that every customer is visible, so none of them go ignored. This way, you keep them all happy and you don’t miss out on any potential business.
2. Make a knowledge base your first point of contact
You know those self-service ‘what is your question?’ tools that big businesses use on their sites? Where you type in your query, click through a few questions, and you get your answer without having to actually speak to anyone?
Well, research shows that the vast majority of consumers prefer using these knowledge bases rather than speaking to a real person. So make these your first step in finding a customer’s solution.
Traditionally, troubleshooting customer service was all about ‘send us an email’ or ‘give us a call,’ but that’s no longer a consumer’s preferred choice of solution.
3. Measure what matters
If you’re not measuring whether your customers are happy, you’re not truly thinking about their experience. And if you aren’t doing that, you have no idea how to improve.
You need to think about customer-focused KPIs. Using these, you can track metrics such as customer satisfaction, conversion rates, customer retention and much more.
If you’re not measuring, you have no idea what is working and what isn’t.
4. Automate in a friendly and personal way
There’s no way you can respond to every customer personally and individually. But you can use automation to provide an almost-perfect replica.
Strange as it may seem, a recent study discovered that up to 90% of businesses don’t acknowledge that an email has been received, which seems oddly unprofessional. This should be a basic courtesy.
If you craft automated but affable responses to everyday queries, you’ll keep your customers happy. And you’re still able to respond individually and personally to any request that merits it. But because most queries don’t, automate responses is typically the way to go.
5. Choose your platforms wisely
Customers like to be contacted on their chosen platform. Some prefer Twitter, others Facebook, others Instagram. Integrate your communication tools so that you’re able to respond to your customers in the way they first communicated with you.
So there you have it! Five easy, actionable e-commerce customer service tips to keep your customers happy, responsive and coming back for more.