Simple Customer Service Tips To Improve Your Ecommerce Business

June 14, 2022

e-Commerce

“Let’s go shopping!”

Just a decade ago, when someone said these three magical words, they usually mean it and had plans to go out. They wandered to visit every retail store, try a different and new variety of products before purchasing, and returned home with a dozen of shopping bags.

Today, one can do the same thing while resting in PJs and sipping a cup of coffee. All hail the e-commerce revolution!

Nowadays, online shopping has become “Me-commerce” for customers. They simply enjoy aspects such as unlimited choice of products, easy returns and refunds, 24×7 shopping, and more.

To make your customers loyal to your brand and keep coming back to your online store and avoid competition, you need to offer them reliable ecommerce customer service at every touchpoint.

And let us inform you that in the field of e-commerce, competition is strong. Think of some of your favorite brands that you can’t do without, ask yourself, what makes you loyal till date?

It is definitely the customer experience. Customer service has a great effect on business. If you do it well, you will see an increase in traffic, boost positive brand awareness, and loyal customers to your website.

Whether it is about tracking customer issues via issue tracking software or offering personal attention via live chat, our ecommerce customer service tips have got you covered.

What is eCommerce Customer Service?

Ecommerce customer service is a process of assisting customers and offering customer services to them in online stores with everything from resolving issues to making online purchase decisions – all while creating a seamless customer experience. When eCommerce store owners invest in improving their customer service, delivered via a live chat, call center, or other channels, they get rewarded with better conversion rates, more loyal customers, and an advantage over their competitors.

Why is Customer Service Important for eCommerce?

Customer service is important to your eCommerce business because it retains customers and extracts more value from them. By providing top-notch customer service, businesses will witness a loyal customer base, positive reviews, new customers, an increment in customer lifetime value, an increase in referrals, and strengthen company culture.

Below are some of the reasons and benefits that justify the importance of customer service in ecommerce industry:

Higher sales
Higher client retention
Higher level of loyalty and trust
Better recognition and brand awareness
Fewer returns or complaints
Increase profitability
Creates a holistic marketing scenario

The Common Customer Service Issues in eCommerce

Not delivering an omnichannel customer experience
Managing customer inquiries efficiently is also a common issue
Tracking order status
Maintaining customer loyalty
The giant headache of a cancellation, return or refund
Know your customers based on their purchase history, browsing history, etc, and offer a personalized experience
Not Solving problems instantly
Seasonality and peak purchase times
Managing customer expectations throughout the delivery process

How can eCommerce improve customer service?

We have prepared a list of an ecommerce customer service tips to help you improve your customer service:

Power of eCommerce Personalization

Brands that have seen the most growth in the last decade have put personalization at the heart of customer experience. 43% of purchases are influenced by personalized recommendations and 77% of customers have paid more for a brand that personalizes.

One of the simplest ways to stand out among your competitors is to personalize your customer’s experience when they shop with you. Some of the personalization areas that you can implement into your business for better customer service are:

Create offers based on user behavior
Display Products or Campaigns based on locations
Upsell, Cross at or after checkout step
Help users to navigate your websites
Personalize your campaigns and emails

All the above areas help you get more traffic, increase sales, increase revenue, and improve customer experience.

Implement Customer Reviews

You can add customer reviews as it provides an authentic way to help them when they need advice. Prospective buyers can find out from these reviews if the product will meet their needs, whether others were happy with it or not, and its quality.

Provide a separate space on your website for reviews and feedback where customers can comment on and rate their purchases.

Social Media

Social Media is one of the best ways to build brand awareness, generate online sales and attract a wider audience. The use of social media platforms plays a significant role in improving customer service.

Social media consultant highlights many positive aspects and provides users with valuable information on social media platforms.

Using social media channels for customer service is gaining popularity in 2022. Whenever a customer cannot connect with the brand via support chat or phone call, they try to reach them via social media platforms.

The mutual benefits of easy brand accessibility via Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and others allow easy customer contact and provide brand building, engaging social interaction, brand loyalty, and widescale contact through multiple channels.

Read More: How to increase online sales through Social Media

Offer Delightful Self-Service Options

Nowadays, it’s very rare that customers put effort to connect with customer care and invest time to get their issues solved. Rather they would prefer something which can be solved on their own.

For this, you can add a delightful knowledge base, articled and news about upcoming products, self-help blogs, detailed FAQs, instructional videos, and online help center, etc for a delightful self-service experience. Having all this will not only cut down on customer support requests but they are also good for website SEO.

Offer A Clear Returns Policy

A key challenge of shopping for products online is that the customers cannot try your products before they purchase them. So make sure to offer a fair, easy-to-find, clear returns policy so that they feel confident being able to send purchases back in case of any issue like product size is not perfect, damaged product, color changes, the product is not as expected, etc. This is one of the best tips to follow if you want to improve your eCommerce customer service.

Automate Response

To make customer service better you can create automate response templates that will be automatically displayed based on the customer issue. You can add templates for issues like Initiate return, Late Shipment, Gift Card balance or expiry, damaged products, order delivery, etc.

Delight Customers with great deals

One of the best customer service tactics in the eCommerce industry is to offer better deals and services to your customers to drive their attention.

You can offer them free shipping, free gift on some fixed amount of purchase, discounts, coupons, and many more other good deals and free offers to impress customers and it will also improve their shopping experience. This will show them that you care about keeping them as long-term and loyal customers.

Invest in Omnichannel Customer Experience

To deliver the perfect customer experience, take the omnichannel route and unify all your communication channels. In today’s digital world your customers are present across all platforms and channels on the internet! And you should be as well! So consider all the channels and platforms of where your customers might be in their lifecycle and try to personalize their journeys across all channels.

Omnichannel marketing of promoting products can greatly improve conversions and boost sales. Incorporate a live chatbot, support chat, contact us details, email addresses, and other communication channels on your website so that you can communicate with your customers in real-time.

One of the best ways to be available round-the-clock and prepare a list of answers to the questions your customers are asking the chatbot.

Employ Seasonal Staff

There are times like Black Friday, New Year Special, Holiday Season, Christmas Week, End of Season Sale, and Festive offers which are considered the busiest time of the year for eCommerce store owners. It is the time when sales are at their peak and definitely if more sales, then expect more returns and more customer support.

So make sure you hire extra staff to cope with the increased queries and workload. It will help to maintain your high levels of customer satisfaction.

Follow up

After purchase, make sure you follow up with the customer to check if everything went smoothly or not. You can use the customer contact details to reach out to them that you have captured as part of the order process.

You can also keep customers informed of special offers, and new products, offer a discount on future purchases and grow your business that way.

Extra essential tips to follow to keep your customers happy:

Learn to be a PRO at problem-solving
Build rapport with your customers
Know your products and services
Admit your mistakes
Admit your mistakes
Make sure you have a content structure website, each and every piece of content of your website must be organized and structured.

Providing The Best Customer Service can Help Your eCommerce Grow

To grow your ecommerce business, you need to attract new customers and retain existing ones by consistently delivering an excellent customer experience and better customer services.

“The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary”. – Sam Walton

Reinventing the online shopping journey and implementing some of these highly efficient customer service tips will help you retain customers and grow their lifetime value.

We hope that this post has given you some tips and ideas that you can implement in your business to improve your ecommerce customer service. Need help improving your eCommerce game? We can assist you to optimize your ecommerce store. Get in touch!