5 best practices for ecommerce customer service

With one click, status update, or blog post, people can now reach thousands of people right away. Now, customers are quite aware of the online reviews and what they can do for an eCommerce firm. A negative post from the dissatisfied customers has the potential to wreck the image of your brand. 

By keeping that in mind, you must provide the best customer service possible. Excellent customer service has become the core value of the eCommerce business. It gives business owners a way to create satisfied customers. After all, a satisfied customer helps the business to grow up and build a new and unique brand image in the competition. 

Do you want to gain more positive reviews about your products and services? Are you looking for some great tips for the best customer service for your eCommerce business? As per the Microsoft State of Global Customer Service report, it has been stated that approximately 85% of the users admit that customer service plays an important role. Interestingly, by 2021, it has been predicted that the customer experience will overtake the price and product worth as the key brand differentiator. 

You must have experienced how major online retailers tracked year-over-year decline over time. Do you know, why does it happen? The key reasons behind this degradation are dissatisfied customer behavior. This article will help how to impress the customers and increase their loyalty towards your business. Let's walk with the article-

What is an e-commerce customer service?

Before going deep into the article to gather the best practices for eCommerce customer services, let's understand the concept behind eCommerce startup. This is a business firm which offers the framework to support shoppers through e-commerce platforms. In order to give full support to the customers, they are obliged to work 24*7. That's why the online business accounts for some unique challenges that need to be resolved-

• Monitoring multiple channels with fast response times
• High volumes of service and support requests
• Common questions related to products, fulfillment, and returns
• Delivering an omnichannel customer experience. 
• Attracting the customers towards the brand.
• Maintaining Customer Loyalty

The most challenging task to operate the eCommerce business in this fierce business is to govern the customer service department. The service team of the eCommerce businesses is typically tasked to keep the customers happy and satisfied. The more customers stay happy and satisfied with the brand, the more revenue will be generated. Some businesses just hire the customer service team to do their tasks.

However, it would be a good idea for the early-stage startups to start talking to the customers themselves and resolve their queries. As the startup founder, you would have a better idea about the sales, products, and business missions. And that's what customers love about small businesses. Once the startup starts gaining recognition in the competition, businesses can prepare an excellent team of customer service representatives.

Best Practices to Set up Your E-commerce Customer Service

There is no denying the fact that today's customers look for the speedy response from their brands- whether it is about delivering their products or responding to their queries. In fact, a survey has been done to check the expectation level of the customers and how quick responses they want from their brands. 

It has been examined that 30% of consumers expect a response through any means in under an hour. When we talk about social channels, then the expectation level keeps on increasing. 

In order to keep the customers connected with the business firms, your customer representative teams need to give responses to the customers as quickly as possible. But that doesn't mean that your team should rush through customer interactions. Quality is still important. 

Till that time, your customer satisfied the query towards your brand; the customer service representative shouldn't rush to other clients. If you're not meeting those expectations, your customer satisfaction levels could be suffering. 

Tailor Your Approach 

Always remember to tailor the approaches to meet the expectation level of your customers. As a fact, every customer is unique; their perspective, likes, problems, and dislikings are all different. The most difficult task here is that every customer wants to get treated according to their requirement. 

So, how will your business deal with this kind of situation? Here, you can use the tools to add information to every customer so that your team will be able to provide a more personalized experience to each of your shoppers. For example,- you can import CRM software or add notes with important details if you are a small startup. 

Request for Feedback

The next practice that you can incorporate in your bucket list of customer service experience is to ask for feedback from your users. After all, your business desires to know how your customers are feeling about your brand. The easiest way to ensure that is by asking for feedback from the users on a weekly or regular basis. 

As an eCommerce retailer, you need to ask for feedback about the products they have been using. Several businesses have started using automation to send emails, messages, and phone calls to the users once a customer makes a purchase. Believe it; this is a good start and can lead to valuable insight into your business. 

But if in case, you want to improve your customer service, then you can launch questionnaires or do surveys to gauge how satisfied your customers are with the level of service you're providing. This methodology will help you get a clearer idea about your customer service and how you can improve it even better in the future.

Give Your Visitors Options 

Earlier times, companies don't use multiple channels to track or assist their customers. At that time, a phone call was enough for them. But now, the time has changed; the perspective of customers has changed. So, now, this method is no longer enough to give excellent service to the customers. Consumers would require multi-channel support—moreover, the ability to contact businesses on a variety of channels. 

If you want to keep a check on your customers, you would need to start widening your thinking horizons. Start using phone support, social media channels, and also email marketing to impress your users. Well, some businesses have started using live chat options and text support to give a quick response to their customers. 

Regardless of how a customer prefers to communicate, they can contact the brand in a way that works for them. That's why, it is said that by attaching more channels would have an excellent impact on overall customer satisfaction — which is more than worth the investment for most businesses. 

Analyze the Entire Customer Journey

And the final practice that can help your business to offer good customer service to your users is by analyzing the customers' entire journey with your brand. When you are looking for ways to improve your customer service, it wouldn't be a good idea to limit your efforts by helping those users who are finding difficulties. 

Whenever you find that your customers are finding difficulty in one area, start improving that one. In this way, you can resolve the existing customers' queries and limit the problems for the new users. After all, you want to attract and retain the users with your brands as much as you can. 

That's why it is said that searching for the ways to involve your team with customers at every stage of the buying process is an excellent way to strengthen your overall customer service, and also to drive even more sales for your business. 

Conclusion

For every eCommerce business, it is important to offer the best customer service to its users. This is the best way to keep your customers loyal, satisfied, and happy with your brand. Therefore, make sure that they are feeling a satisfying factor whenever they make any purchase through your store. 

If your company doesn't have multiple service channels, then ensure that your team starts to increase your presence on the service channels. This could help your customers to keep you posted about services and products. The more you stay connected with your users, the more loyalty your business will gain from the users.