Elements Of Great Customer Service In eCommerce
By Paul Wynter August 2nd, 2020Let’s cut to the chase: everyone wants the customers that are considering your eCommerce products right now. Customers truly have a wide variety of options and choices, and if you’re looking to make sure that you always get the sale that you deserve, customer service is where it’s at. Sure, the quality of your products and the prices factor in, but how you interact with your customers is going to be still more important. If you want to make sure that you’ve got all options going for you, here are some great tips to give you unbeatable customer service.
The most important facets of customer service
There are quite a few things to focus on within the diverse and people-centred world of customer service, but what it all comes down to is making sure that you treat the customer like a valuable person. Pretty simple, maybe, but you’d be surprised at how many people don’t do that simply because it’s inconvenient.
• Optimize your response time: Customers hate having to wait around if they take the time to send you a message. Whether it’s a quick clarifying question or something for serious, they’ll get cranky if you take too long to get back to them. Do your best to respond to them as quickly as possible. If you need it, use an AI chatbot to help take the edge off, especially if it’s a question that can be answered with a simple re-routing to FAQ or another page like that.
Another tip is to post your response time. Similar to a Page on Facebook, you can have your “average response time” listed with a number of minutes and/or hours. This will be great when you are looking at helping your customer see how motivated you are and, of course, keep you incentives to keep it as short as possible.
• Use social media to help you connect with customers: Speaking of social media, you’ll also want to put some time and effort into connecting with your customs for customer service purposes on your favourite platform. Encourage them to follow you on social media and interact with the by answering questions and even handling complaints publicly where others can see it. It helps keep your customer service relationships public and accessible to those who are looking to trust you. Not to mention that customer service on social media is an often neglected concept!
• Phone and email are great, but offer live chat, too: As far as the methods of communication, phone and email are great, but you’ll also really want to make sure that you’ve got a live chat. More than ever, customers are comfortable with a live chat and will prefer that to any other method. Not only is it more comfortable, it’s modern and it also helps keep the response time faster on both ends.
• Create and maintain an FAQ page that is easily accessible: Customers are always going to have questions. Sometimes the answers are waiting for them right in plain sight and sometimes they’re not. If you want to give customers the best possible as far as proactive customer service, an FAQ page is great. On this page, you’ll have a series of questions with detailed and friendly answers to any and all of them that you can think of. This page can be tedious sometimes for eCommerce managers, but it’s important. Add new questions and responses as you get them from customers and always make sure that this page itself is easily accessible from any and all platforms.
You’ll more than likely still get customers asking questions that are on that FAQ page, but you can always redirect them to that specific question and response on the page, or use the AI bot technology to give them an answer.
To the skeptical customer that is looking for whether or not they should trust you, an FAQ page is also going to be a great way to show your professionalism. First, you have an FAQ page. Second, it’s friendly and informative, and third, it’s focused on helping answer questions that most customers have, even if they won’t admit it! These are bonus points in customer service.
YouTube for social outreach
• Personalize all conversation: This is tiny little detail but it’s also a great helping hand in memorable customer service. Whenever you interact with a customer, make sure it’s a personalized message. From AI chatbots to actual live chat to phone conversations and even email newsletters, make sure it’s personalized to them using their preferred name. Not only will it make them feel like you are actually talking to them, it also shows your professionalism and dedicating to actually helping them out. Anyone who just says “hi valued customer” doesn’t give the same professional vibe, no matter how much they try to do so.
Another note on this is to make sure that, if it is a live situation where you are in charge rather than a bot or email algorithm, is to get their name right! From spelling to capitalization, you’ll quickly turn off someone if you accidentally spell their name wrong or use the capitalization in the wrong place. It’s the equivalent to having mispronounce your name wrong in real life. It’s a bad impression on the customer and it can lead you astray in a professional point of view!
One of the best details about customer service is that you’ll notice that all of this is doable and it’s nothing complex. That’s because good customer service isn’t about metrics and data. It’s about interacting with customers and treating them right no matter what. If you want to succeed, these elements of great customer service will lead you down the right path to do just that. Even if it seems like a lot of extra effort right now, it will always prove to be worth it and will earn you more than just a few extra sales — it’ll separate you out from the competition and build your professional reputation.
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