A positive customer experience will aid in the development of trust and the encouragement of repeat purchases. A bad customer experience, on the other hand, may result in a decrease in sales, a tarnished image, and unfavorable online reviews.
In a survey, 58 percent of American customers indicated they stopped doing business with a company because they had a negative customer service experience with them. For individuals between the ages of 18 and 34, this number rises to 68 percent.
It is believed that it costs five times more to acquire new consumers than it does to maintain current customers, making it critical to keep existing customers satisfied if you want to be successful in the long run.
E-commerce may be the one of the most challenging industries in which to do business. But at the center of your eCommerce business’s strategic strategy should be the importance of having exceptional customer service.
Exceptional Service
1. Exceptional Service Is Worth Investing Time And Energy
The things that you pay attention to via measurement are the ones that you will end up altering through your actions, so pay attention to them. Customer service, on the other hand, is very quantifiable. How fast you react to consumers, how many questions they ask, and what your customer satisfaction ratings are all important factors to consider.
And everyone should be familiar with the fundamental measures of response, customer satisfaction levels, and request volume. However, being quantifiable does not imply that anything is significant. Furthermore, your helpdesk cannot tell you what is most important to your business. As a result, you must choose some extra steps that are appropriate for your situation. A relevant measure is one that is useful. It should be connected to a goal that your business wants to accomplish.
A moveable object is one that can be changed by the activities of the individual. Furthermore, it should be genuine. They must relate a genuine tale in order to be accepted. It is easy to deliver a false message by using legitimate phone numbers. You want to be truthful, even if it means hurting others. Furthermore, they should be consistent. The significance of a single data point is overshadowed by the importance of patterns over time. As a result, you should choose anything that fits all four of these criteria, but there are still a lot of choices available to you.
Begin by identifying the desired result you want to achieve. Increasing the number of new consumers, increasing the number of sales to current customers, or perhaps increasing the average sale value are all examples of what that means in e-commerce.
Identify the activities that your consumers would need to do in order to achieve the results you identified in your next step. As a result, customers must visit the website more often, tell their friends about your store, or do a greater proportion of their purchasing via you.
Then consider what your team can do to most effectively promote those activities to take place. This is when things start to become a little more adventurous. If you want to promote more repeat business, then maybe concentrating on providing a hassle-free returns experience might be a top priority for your company. In phase four, you should concentrate on metrics that track the main actions. In the case of generating hassle-free returns, for example, you may track the number of return requests you get and the time it takes to process such requests, among other things.
It requires a customer-centric organization to consistently provide positive experiences. Whatever the case, if your website isn’t up to par, if you’re selling the incorrect goods, if customer complaints never make it beyond support, no matter how excellent your customer care team is, they’ll always be playing catch up. Building a customer-centric culture into your organization from the beginning allows everyone engaged to provide a level of service that will help you stand out from the competition.
2. Exceptional Service Helps You Earn More
If you’re on a limited budget or aren’t sure what you’re going to use, there are lots of free and low-cost alternatives that may be very effective. So, would you have assisted us in setting up, are you using an email account, or are you using a complex system of smoke signals? It’s time to rethink your strategy and approach before pulling out the long list of features that I need for this project. Because of the fundamental criteria, they are very straightforward. You must have at least one method for individuals to reach you, as well as a mechanism for responding to their messages.
If you have such qualities, you will be able to provide great service. Start with email if you want to do e-commerce. It’s completely free. It is now open. It is understood by your consumers. There are a plethora of resources accessible. Email, on the other hand, scales very well. It is far easier for one individual to respond to a large number of emails than it is for one person to respond to a live chat or phone support request. So he gets a free Gmail account, which is part of your low-budget customer care toolkit.
Create a customer service account. Maintain a clear separation between your personal staff and your general business correspondence while you’re gone. Gmail has excellent spam screening capabilities. Labels and rules may be used to categorize and organize all of these communications. It will be just good for quite some time, particularly if you simply have a small staff working for you. There is also a free contact form. It’s likely that your Shopify theme or your website already has a support email address built in; all you have to do is direct it to that support email address.
A knowledge base—you’ll find early on in your customer service career that you’re answering the same queries over and over again. If you begin storing those often asked questions in a knowledge base, you will be able to recommend consumers to you instead of them referring to you. You may start with a simple page on your website, or there are lots of free knowledge base stuff available that will provide you with enough structure and control to get you up and running.
Maintain that knowledge base on a new tab on your browser, regardless of what you select. Whenever you create an excellent response to a client, copy and paste it into a draft in your knowledge base to save time. And then come back later once you’ve wrapped everything up. In addition, a customer community is available for little or no cost. Is it possible for you to provide your consumers with a forum in which they may discuss your goods and how they utilize them? If it makes sense, set up a Slack account or any other online forum software and allow your customers to assist one another.
3. Exceptional Service Helps You Retain Customers Longer
One approach to describe exceptional service would be service that regularly goes above and beyond the expectations of your consumers. And in order to do so, you must first understand what those expectations are. When it comes to your rivals’ response times, what are the norms in your industry? Are you able to beat those times? Would it make a difference to your consumers if you could? What degree of service are your clients used to receiving? And are you able to consistently exceed their expectations in order to please them over time?
Simply asking your consumers which channels they prefer may be a good start. Second, be aware of the resources available to you. You are aware of how much time you have, which employees you have, for how long they will be employed, and what talents they possess. After that, it is a matter of determining which channels you might realistically provide at a degree of quality that will assist you in achieving your service objectives.
If you want to be extremely responsive, but you only have one person to assist you with clients, finding assistance is going to be a difficult task. It is preferable to have very high-quality assistance on a small number of channels rather than being everywhere but doing it in a poor manner.
Social media — You should completely control your Twitter and Facebook profiles, which should be in your company’s name. Even if you don’t want to utilize them to provide assistance right now, you can still update their profiles and link people to the resources you have available to help them. That’s all there is to it. You can provide excellent customer service with just a limited number of tools at your disposal. And it’s likely that you’ll be a long time before you outgrow your current clothes. And you’ll have a lot clearer idea of the kind of assistance you want to provide by that time. You can then choose more strategically from the available options.
You want to establish a strong foundation of customer-focused processes so that, even on a poor day, providing excellent customer service is practically a given as a result of the structure that you’ve put in place to assist you and your colleagues.
Being present where your consumers are, whether on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Live Chat, is essential to developing a successful multichannel strategy.
When you have established your lines of communication, inform your consumers that you are available to assist them via these channels. Your goal should be to offer consistently excellent customer service across all of your communication channels.
As an ecommerce company, your aim is to provide excellent customer service to your consumers while also making them happy.
4. Exceptional Service Helps You Create Word-of-mouth Marketing
It is essential that you get to know your clients so that you can better comprehend their needs and what constitutes excellent service in their eyes and ears.
Great service is fast, accurate, consistent, kind, and low-effort on the part of the provider. Responding to consumers within a fair period, taking into consideration your industry, your client base, and your support channel, is what timely implies. In the event that you are providing live chat, customers will anticipate a response within a minute or two. In terms of email assistance, a response within one business day is much better than the norm.
Providing exceptional customer service is a chance to truly distinguish yourself. By putting money into customer service, you may convert that initial purchase into a long-term client, or perhaps a fan who will spread the word about your company to their friends and family members. Nonetheless, you must choose what excellent service means to you; however, it should be prompt, accurate, and personable. And the good news is that it won’t cost you much more than your time to do this.
Those who provide customer service will be using that item on a consistent basis throughout the day. Furthermore, if it is clumsy or unclear, it will cause people to get frustrated and slow down. They may devote their time and efforts to assisting consumers if they have a seamless experience. Will this support desk be able to develop along with you? You don’t want to spend money on anything that you don’t need right now.
However, it is comforting to know that it can be easily integrated with other technologies if necessary. And how excellent is their customer service? As a result, you would expect that any customer service tool business would provide excellent service. However, this isn’t always the case. You want to feel certain that when you need assistance, they will be available to provide accurate, compassionate, and fast responses. Send in some requests for assistance. Give them a chance. And do you have access to the reporting that you require?
It is imperative that online companies do all in their power to offer excellent ecommerce customer care to their customers. A excellent place to start is with an assessment of how well you are presently doing in this area of your life.
To fully comprehend your clients’ requirements and desires, you must first communicate with them. We’re talking about doing interviews and surveys, as well as examining the customer service KPIs that you currently have in place.
Yes, this seems to be a difficult task. However, in practice, it is possible to keep things simple. Log onto Survey Monkey and spend an hour brainstorming some important open-ended questions you’d want to ask your consumers about their experiences. After that, include it in your next newsletter or include it in one of your email templates for future reference.
If you currently have ecommerce customer service software, take note of the number of tickets received, the kinds of tickets received, and the response times received.
Increased sales during the holidays or on Black Friday, for example, may naturally result in an increase in communications. However, if you are continuously dealing with a high volume of issues, something about your ecommerce customer service has to be adjusted or replaced.
The customer journey encompasses every single interaction a client has with your company – not simply interactions with your support staff.
Ideally, you want to give consumers a positive experience at every stage of the purchasing process. This should improve customer satisfaction while simultaneously decreasing the number of assistance requests received.
ensure that their consumers have access to high-resolution pictures and videos of their goods from every aspect possible In contrast to other sites, you will be able to see what the bottoms of your new shoes will look like before they are delivered to your door step. They also provide additional information regarding product sizes, such as whether they are tiny or big, so that consumers do not have to inquire.
You may not have the means to provide this level of ecommerce customer care, but adding a sizing chart to your product pages or including returns information at the bottom of each purchase confirmation might help you stand out from the competition. These little adjustments may have a big impact on your client journey and the number of incoming inquiries.
No matter what your consumers have to say, you must respond in a kind and pleasant manner. The ability to provide excellent ecommerce customer care is an important skill that you must master if you want to increase your sales.
Positive customer feedback may draw attention to the excellent quality of your product or service. As a result, you should express your gratitude to favorable reviewers for their contributions. It is possible that additional individuals will follow suit as a result of this.
In addition, good answers and interactions with consumers may assist to enhance your rating and exposure on marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay – much in the same way that getting reviews can benefit you.
Constructing consumers’ confidence in your brand has the potential to result in a natural referral system, since having customers suggest your company to others is much more effective than any quantity of promotional material that is produced. Word-of-mouth and referral business is usually the most straightforward and cost-effective method of acquiring new customers.
5. Exceptional Service Is Difficult To Replicate Than Low Prices Or Broad Product Range
It’s possible that there will be no shocks for you at initially. However, if you maintain track from month to month, you will be able to identify when that split changes. And that may be very useful in determining, for example, if your product page designs have been successful or whether you have generated more support. Manually tagging will be effective in this case. However, the greater the amount of automation, the less work your customer care staff will have to put in.
And the less effort they have to exert, the more probable it is that they will do it manually when the situation calls for it. Utilize workflows and rules to automatically handle incoming requests and classify them as they arrive. The majority of helpdesks will be able to assist you with this. Big bucket tags are excellent for reporting purposes, but there is another kind of tagging that is useful for process. To help the team prioritize urgent questions, you could mark them as such, or you might label questions from VIPs as such, or refund inquiries as such, so that they can be dealt with by certain groups or individuals who are assigned to them.
Customer service may be improved by being more effective at identifying certain kinds of queries that are often asked and giving out the same response in an incredibly short amount of time.
However, it would be preferable to discover such questions, discuss them with the team, and then address the underlying problem so that they don’t occur as often in the future. Unfortunately, it’s very typical for customer support employees to feel disconnected from the rest of the organization’s operations. As a result, they focus on managing what they can, such as how fast they respond to client queries and how effectively they collaborate with them. However, it is possible that very valuable information, such as the fact that a feature on our shop is perplexing a large number of customers, may get stuck in support and never be resolved.
The reason for this is because they are so excellent at addressing it that it is not apparent to anybody outside of the support staff. It is important for you to consider how to create a clear channel of feedback from customer service to the rest of the team as a company owner at all times. I mean, in the materials for this class, there are more specifics on how to go about it. Briefly stated: provide your employees with enough opportunity and instruction in identifying and reporting problems, equip them with a tool or method to communicate this information, and then act on the information they provide you.
It is much preferable to eliminate a question rather than become very proficient at addressing it. Of course, you’ll never be able to get rid of everything, so it’s critical to optimize their procedures for the queries that will unavoidably come in via your contact form. A really effective customer service encounter begins before the caller ever speaks with you…. It’s standard practice for websites to include some kind of contact us page. However, with a little design modification, you can have it perform a lot more work for you, thus saving both your time and the time and effort of your customers.
Some suggestions for an efficient contact page, which should be easily accessible. It shouldn’t be given a cutesy name. Don’t keep it a secret. Put it in your main navigation so that customers who are looking for assistance don’t get even more frustrated while trying to figure out how to contact you. It should make you feel more human. If you’re investing in customer service as a means to distinguish yourself from the competition, make it obvious to your consumers that they can speak with actual individuals, maybe by using pictures. Create a human connection by filling out the form on the contact page.
In order to make it easier to find your support choices, it should consolidate them all on a single page, including self-service alternatives such as a knowledge base, customer forums, and help channels such as email and chat. Customers may be guided via the use of design. If self-service is the most effective method for a client to get assistance, design should be used to make it the most apparent choice on the page. Furthermore, it should inquire about what you need.
It’s very irritating when a client calls with a query, but they haven’t provided you with enough information to assist them. Make a change to your form so that it asks for the correct information up front, in order to save everyone time. Furthermore, it should establish expectations. Provide them with an estimate of when they should anticipate a response. For example, when you go to Disneyland and they inform you how long you will have to wait for a certain ride. It’s considerably simpler to do this when responding to an email. Small changes to your contact forms may add up to significant savings over time, if done consistently.
6. Exceptional Service Develops Brand Loyalty
the ultimate in self-service In all honesty, it’s a far better experience. What does it look like in the context of e-commerce sites? Well, you should begin by selecting the customers who are most likely to benefit from self-service in your company. If you are unable to complete the service yourself, contact your customer support team. They will almost certainly be able to tell you the most often asked questions. And take a look at your labeling and reporting so you can get a better understanding of where the inquiries are coming from.
The most effective queries, however, are those that are often asked and have the same or similar answers for everyone, such as “How do I file a return?” Customer inquiries that need your staff to do a little job, but that the customers themselves could complete if they were provided with the necessary resources, such as updating their credit card information. You may make inquiries when the answer is already available on the website more apparent, for example, if I have queues around shipping prices and delivery timeframes, you can make them more obvious.
Increase the prominence of the links between them. Make sure to include them on all of your receipts and other forms of communication. And product detail pages: if you find yourself having to give the same information to consumers on an individual basis over time, put in the effort up front and add those data straight to the website. Additionally, consider using additional material, such as photographs or videos, wherever feasible. Text is excellent for certain consumers, but other customers just do not want to read a lot. Customer forums are yet another excellent self-service target.
Is it possible for you to offer a space for your customers to assist one another? You’ll still need to staff it and keep it up to date, but you’ll be able to grow it far more efficiently than you would if you answered every question one at a time. Of course, it’s simple for me to advise you that you should take care of yourself. Despite the fact that you are aware that it will pay off in the long run, setting it up takes a significant amount of time. So enlist the assistance of your team. Customer service representatives are often very thankful for the opportunity to take their heads out of the line for a short period of time.
Also, provide some evidence or make a video to support your claim. And, at the absolute least, you can make the procedure as smooth as possible for them by removing as much friction as possible. Make it simple for them to tag and answer questions, since there should be a knowledge base page dedicated to this subject. After that, organize those articles into a prioritized list in your self-service knowledge base. The use of self-service is just one method of lowering the customer contact rate, but it is a simple one to begin with, and you may expand on it over time. And if you combine that with enhancing your tools and procedures, as well as increasing the efficiency of your workforce, you may begin to decrease your dependence on recruiting new employees to assist all of those additional consumers.
7. Exceptional Customer Service: A Powerful Tool In Building A Long-term, Successful Business
They place a high value on their time in addition to their money. And remember to be human, even if the situation calls for you to be very formal. Make use of their name and mimic their tone to make it obvious that you are paying attention to them and reacting to them specifically. And here’s a helpful model: respond, elaborate, and anticipate the question. Answer the question that they’ve asked straight away, but don’t be afraid to delve into more detail. Provide them with extra information that will be helpful to them. After that, predict what their next inquiry could be and provide them with an answer to that question as well.
Please elaborate — we do have a shirt type that is comparable in blue. We also have these in stock in the size that you want, and they are priced at $24.99. Keeping that patent in mind allows you to offer a more thorough response and better service. However, things may go awry from time to time.
You’re going to have challenging talks and find yourself in uncomfortable circumstances. So, first and foremost, pay attention. It’s difficult to remain calm when someone else’s rage or displeasure is being expressed. However, if you take a deep breath, you will make room for everyone to breathe and go ahead. Give a real apology, sympathize with the other person, make it obvious that you are at blame if you are, and express regret. And don’t be vague about the issue; don’t skirt around it.
Make it very clear what occurred and what you intend to do to rectify the situation. I’m interested in learning why. If a client is angry and their behavior seems irrational to you, you should ask them to explain themselves. It’s possible that they were counting on you for something that you were completely unaware of. You won’t find out until you question them directly. And even if you do not grasp the fundamental problem, you may still be able to provide assistance. And even if they don’t feel heard, they will at least know that they have been heard.
8. Exceptional Service Forms A Connection To Another Person
When it comes to your company, your voice and tone are just as important as your design or marketing in defining your brand. Consider the airline industry, which is required to provide safety briefings. Ever while they all have to provide essentially the same information, the manner in which they choose to present that information may make the experience of flying on various airlines quite different before they even take off.
Taking time to consider how you begin conversations and selecting phrases and terms that are consistent with how you want your company to be regarded are important. a few pointers to keep in mind Instead of saying, “We’re out of stock, sorry,” try saying, “We’re out of stock, sorry.” You may expect to see that item on our shelves in a few of days. Be succinct—you may be pleasant and personable, but you shouldn’t have your consumers read or listen to a lengthy speech before they receive the response they want.
Conclusion
Customer service is a critical component of every company’ success. It makes no difference whether your company is online or offline. If you want your company to thrive, you must be ready to go above and beyond to provide the best possible customer service. It becomes much more critical in the case of eCommerce businesses.
As a result of the extensive contact with consumers that occurs in physical and mortar businesses, customer service is inherently fluid. However, the absence of physical contact raises the bar for the kind of customer care experience required to be successful in online shops.
In order to develop your ecommerce company, you must first maintain existing consumers while also attracting new ones by continuously providing a great customer experience to all of your clients.
Increase employee motivation and highlight the importance of customer service to your company by rewarding workers who go above and beyond to meet or exceed their customers’ expectations. Depending on the resources available to your small business, create spot bonuses or gift cards to reward your customer service employees for their efforts in maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction and building an unmatched corporate culture.
By addressing customer service from an analytics perspective, ecommerce businesses have the benefit of setting the bar higher than their competitors. It is simpler to track customer experience metrics in an attempt to continuously offer better and more up-to-date solutions that provide a seamless customer experience.
In the end, your clients are the lifeblood of your business. Spend the necessary time and resources to create the best possible client experience in order to distinguish your business from competitors that do not recognize the real value of excellent customer service.
