How can an Ecommerce business improve customer service?
Did you know Shopify statistics revealed that 62% of online customers say that their previous experience remarkably influences their buying decision?
It indicates that providing great customer service is vital to sustaining the digital landscape.
If you look at the other side of the story, a negative customer experience leads to a decline in sales, a damaged reputation, and a pile-up with the stack of negative online reviews.
If you want your brand to eclipse the competition and be sustainable for the long term, providing an exceptional customer experience is crucial.
One of the compelling reasons why customer service has become the heart of businesses is because of the evolution of the digital ecosystem.
Before dwelling on and looking at the ways to meet your customer’s sky-high expectations and gain their trust, let’s look at the fundamentals of customer support.
What is effective customer service?
It is a service to assist shoppers in making purchases by harnessing the power of online platforms throughout their buying journey.
To put it another way, helping customers in online shopping to resolve issues in order to offer a seamless customer experience across all digital platforms.
Amazon is well renowned for delivering the best customer service. They also got an excellent customer satisfaction award thrice. It shows that customer service is one of the most significant factors in staying ahead of the competition.
If you are about to start your business and crafting the stages of Ecommerce development, consider customer service as the first priority.
7 best practices to provide seamless customer service
The transformation in the buyer’s landscape pushes businesses to show their online presence and thrive in the digital space. The businesses that stand the test of time in Ecommerce are the ones that have unleashed the potential of online storefronts with stellar customer experience.
Here are the seven best practices to level up your Ecommerce business game
- Craft an omnichannel strategy
Don’t you think you lose your business if you are not present in your audience’s preferred digital space? Obviously, yes!
That’s why here comes an omnichannel approach that helps your business focus on core elements to make your customer’s shopping journey experience wonderful. Your customers utilise different platforms and channels. Hence, it is essential to mark your presence on different platforms to meet your brand with them consistently.
The three core elements of the omnichannel strategy are
- Identify your customer touch points. It is a point where your brand interacts with your customer via the website, email, social media, phone, etc.
- Craft a customer journey strategy to engage with your customers across different touchpoints.
- Don’t forget to provide a consistent user experience during the customer shopping journey.
- Create a knowledge base Ecommerce Frontline
A knowledge-based self-service forges your potential audience to make informed purchases by offering them comprehensive answers to common queries. Now you might be thinking, why is it necessary to provide a knowledge base self-service?
The below self-service statistics need to be contemplated to understand their significance
- 73% of online customers wish to independently resolve issues related to products or services.
- 64% of customers make an effort to sort out their queries before communicating with customer service.
- 90% of users diligently used self-service systems to get the answers to their queries.
The intuitive benefits of creating a comprehensive and solid knowledge base help save the customer and service team time. Before creating a solid knowledge base, you must ensure that it consists of all the relevant information, including return policy, deliveries, FAQs, etc.
- Deliver exceptional real-time support
If you want to enhance your customer satisfaction rate, you have to leverage the power of live chat software and real-time engagement tools. The key differentiator that helps you leapfrog your competition is to offer seamless customer interaction by resolving customers’ queries instantly.
If you are able to connect with your customers in real-time and resolve their issues promptly, they are less likely to abandon your website. This way, you can retain your customers, boost your sales, and bring a more qualified conversion rate.
- Act on customer feedback
In the era of the digital age, a profound advertisement can be done by your satisfied customers.
You might be wondering how?
Your satisfied customers recommend your services and products and stand up for your brand with positive feedback. Customer feedback is foundational to accelerating your business growth because it gives a transparent view of your business insights in the digital world.
It also gives you profound information regarding your business by determining your customer pain points to improve your product and services and offering irresistible Ecommerce customer service.
- Track relevant KPIs
Customer service is a powerful marketing strategy to create an exceptional brand reputation and trust among prospective customers. If your business wants to enhance customer service, one important parameter is to measure and track key performance indicators (KPIs).
It will provide real-time insights into how well your business offers customer service by understanding the pain points of your target audience. This way, you can determine the resources needed to deploy to make necessary improvements.
- Devise customer retention strategy
In the digital landscape, one of the key challenges is client retention. It is as important as getting a new customer.
Customer attention can only happen when customers experience top-notch services from the brand.
To thrive in the competitive space, your brand needs to work on the entire customer life cycle, including nurturing, engaging, and retaining.
To retain your customers, you may work in the following ways
• Incentives/ Rewards to your elite customers.
• Implement loyalty programs to re-engage your loyal users.
• Building brand communities to benefit customers and enhance brand image.
- Make return policies and shipping transparent.
Regarding shipping, your customers won’t be satisfied if they are misled about how long they need to wait or the charges paid. If you want your customers to be fully satisfied, transparency plays a vital role. It should be clear and transparent about what you are going to offer them
- Define order processing time
- Mention taxes, duties, or additional charges
- Shipping weekends policy
- Delivery alternatives cost
- Delivery time for shipping
How is Ecommerce Business different from the brick and mortar model?
Ecommerce Business differs from brick and mortar in many ways. Let’s look at the profound comparison-
| Parameters | Ecommerce Business | Brick and mortar model |
| Locations | Via website & virtual shopping cart | Physical storefront, outlets, or locations. |
| Scope | Large scope as they follow omnichannel strategy. | Small scope as they only have to sell via their stores. |
| Marketing | Powerful marketing leveraging multiple platforms. | Follows the traditional format of marketing. |
| Operating hours | 24/7, no time restrictions | Defined operating hours |
| Customer Connection | Through various virtual mediums like chat, email and phone. | It has a slight advantage as it is more of a face-to-face connection. |
| Customer expectations | High expectations due to the steep competition in the online marketplace. | Fewer expectations compared with Ecommerce business |
Wrapping up
The backbone of any Ecommerce business is exceptional customer service. Due to the enhancement in online shopping, a positive buying experience is vital to thrive in the online marketplace.
Leveraging the best customer service practices helps you thrive in your business and build a great brand reputation. However, if you are following the old traditional ways, you must reinvent the online buyer’s journey and unleash modern marketing methods to retain more customers and generate more sales.
