7 Ways to Enhance Your eCommerce Customer Service [With Do’s & Don’ts]

“A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.” – Michael LeBoeuf

If you wonder what makes Amazon an eCommerce behemoth, then look no further than its customer service.

Excellent customer service has given Amazon a distinctive business edge that led to it becoming the market leader it is today.

If you think that’s an overstatement, look at these stats –

• 95% of people consider customer service important in their choice and loyalty to a brand. (Microsoft)
• 89% of people are more likely to make another purchase after a positive customer service experience. (Salesforce)
• A customer is 4X likely to switch to a competitor if they face a service-based issue. (Bain and Company)

The truth is customer service is vital to growing your eCommerce business.

The only question you need to ask yourself is how you can improve your customer service for better results.

And the answer is right here. Keep reading.

Best Practices for Effective eCommerce Customer Service

eCommerce customer service is the support you provide your customers to achieve their goals. These goals can vary from making a purchasing decision to resolving issues on shipment and returns.

An effective eCommerce customer service helps you in many ways, be it boosting customer satisfaction, increasing up-sell and cross-sell opportunities or enhancing business reputation.

To leverage these benefits, you need to optimize customer service. Here are 7 best practices you can count on for this.

Let’s discuss them in detail.

1. Become Proactive

Your customers won’t know where to go for their queries if you don’t tell them about it. So, you need to implement services like live chat and FAQs to encourage them to contact you.

Keep in mind that users expect prompt answers. Otherwise, they’ll go elsewhere. A right balance between convenience and speed is necessary to serve customers with quality.

2. Provide a Personalized Experience

Many times your customers are not looking for general answers but personalized advice and attention. According to an Accenture study, 33% of customers abandoned business relationships due to a lack of personalization.

You can offer personal support in many ways, including product recommendations, loyalty programs, and hand-written thank you notes. Another common yet effective personalization method is to use customers’ names during interactions because it humanizes the conversation and makes people pay attention.

3. Develop a Multichannel Strategy

In this era of competition, you can’t afford to wait for your customers to come to you. You need to go where they are. So, establish social media presence on all the platforms your customers use.

Also, note that customers switch between multiple channels during their shopping journey. So, combine your social presence with other channels like emails, SMS, and phone calls to provide users a frictionless experience across different platforms.

4. Enable Self-Service Options

Many customers don’t prefer to interact with customer service reps. They like to resolve their issues on their own to save time and effort. To help them out, you can create a dedicated knowledge base or online help center focusing on popular issues like return policies, shipping, refund procedures, and more.

You can also include self-help blogs, instructional videos. and articles to simplify the process and guide your customers on using your products. The key is to anticipate any problem that may come their way and provide its solution before it escalates.

5. Leverage Customer Service Tools

eCommerce customer service has to deal with numerous support issues and deadlines regularly. To ease their burden and improve functioning, think about implementing automated customer service tools.

These tools can help you automate ticket creation and assignment to support agents. You can also create canned responses to queries and set up automated emails to expand the bandwidth of your customer service team.

6. Act on Customer Feedback

A satisfied customer is your best advertisement. To measure and improve customer satisfaction, you should refer to your customer feedback and suggestions. The important point here is to not just collect feedback but also process it and act on the insights.

Use your positive feedback to build customer loyalty, and for negative feedback, plan a response strategy to resolve the issues raised. This will help you deliver a better customer experience and improve retention.

7. Track and Optimize Customer Journeys

Every touchpoint your customers have with your eCommerce store is a step closer to their buying journey. To make this journey a success, you need to map out these touchpoints and any potential pain points along the way.

Then, bring your whole team together to fix these issues on various levels. Remember, customer service is not just a department, it’s everyone’s responsibility, and therefore, should be treated that way.

eCommerce Customer Service – Do’s and Don’ts

Now that you are equipped with the best practices to enhance your eCommerce customer service, here are some quick do’s and don’ts that will help you maximize your results.

Final Thoughts

As customer expectations are increasing, robust customer service is becoming essential than ever to succeed in the eCommerce space. Hopefully, these tips have provided you with some direction to get started with your eCommerce customer service optimization.

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