Ecommerce customer service isn’t just about meeting buyer expectations. It’s about exceeding them. 95% of customers say that customer service is important to their choice of and loyalty to a brand. (Source: Microsoft).
Customer service can be the most important factor in how customers perceive your brand and can have an immediate and direct impact on your sales and loyalty. Fortunately, implementing this mission critical business function does not have to be complicated if you simply take time to understand your customers and then streamline your systems so that your service agents can focus on those customers.
Understanding your customer’s needS
The more you understand your customers and their needs, the better you can serve them. If your website doesn’t address questions that arise throughout the buying journey, you’ve created purchasing barriers and your shoppers may take their business elsewhere.
Ensuring your browsers and buyers are informed at every point of their online journey reduces their need to utilize FAQ’s, chat, or help desk. Review your current purchase paths to identify areas for improvement:
- Pre-purchase:
- Ads – entice with ample information to induce click-throughs
- Product Pages – accurate details, numerous photos and videos, specifications, assembly instructions and more go a long way in building product confidence
- Reviews – prominently displayed ratings and reviews build credibility
- Checkout:
- Render a clear overview of important product details
- Provide transparent pricing
- Include clear shipping options and timelines
- Allow the cart to auto-save for an easy purchase later
- Post-purchase:
- Provide a clear return and refund policy
- Offer care/maintenance information, if applicable
- Send post-purchase follow-ups for reviews (and read them)
- Social Media:
- Actively post on social media and solicit purchase feedback, including images/videos on purchases
- In your email and SMS channels, ask shoppers to follow you and rate your business.
- Ensure a team member is reading messages and comments, and communicating them to the team. Follow-up on comments and reply to messages.
OPTIMIZE YOUR HELPDESK
Now that you better understand your customers’ needs, you need to ensure your team has an optimized customer support system in place to effectively support your browsers’ and buyers’ needs. A robust customer experience helpdesk, like our partner Gorgias, should do 4 things:
- Give access to order & product information. Order and product data should not only be available on your website, but should also be accessible to your customer service team. A helpdesk that informs and advises customer service representatives will bolster customer satisfaction and support a healthy sales cycle. Your helpdesk should have easy access to:
- Product details: sizing, how does a product work
- Inventory details: when is product back in stock, color/size options
- Shipping details: when will I receive it, how much will it cost
- Technical support: installation information, product specs, compatibility with other products
- Provide self-service tools. By deflecting low-impact tickets (without sacrificing support quality) using self-service tools, you can provide immediate, accurate answers to customer inquiries, allowing your agents to surface the high-value or high-priority tickets. Choose the most common questions to be supported through self-service such as:
- Where is my order? (WISMO)
- How can I cancel/replace an item/edit my order?
- A discount code is not working
- My item arrived late or was damaged
- My credit card is not working
- Automate tools. Automation preemptively provide customers with details that inform and guide them through the post-purchase stage, without being a burden on your customer service team.
- Activate self-service flows in chat, such as chat widget to track an order. Customers will be pleasantly surprised that they can find this information without any wait time by clicking the Track Order button.
- Send order confirmation emails that answer common questions and include links to helpful supporting documentation
- Give your customers every opportunity to access your Help Center for self-service options by including a prominent link in every support email.
- Offer a holistic view of the customer. In a world of increasing customer expectations, it’s more important than ever to understand your customers holistically. To ensure you are providing an omnichannel experience, you need to arm your agents with a view into all aspects of the customer – items in their carts, orders statuses, past order details, return/refund statuses, loyalty/reward points, social media comments/messages, live chat conversations and more – ensuring their interactions with your customer service representatives are personalized and meaningful.
- Provide an easy-to-use view of the full customer journey, including orders, chats, returns, loyalty points, and more.
- Centralize support tickets from all touchpoints – orders, live chat conversations, text messages, social media comments.
- Enable and empower your agents. Provide your agents with tools to immediately address and resolve customer issues.
- Ensure your Customer Service helpdesk is integrated with your ecommerce platform to allow your agents to perform the most popular support actions while responding to tickets, to avoid navigating multiple tabs to fully resolve customer questions.
- Give your agents tools to effortlessly recommend products from your store and fully manage orders without ever leaving the helpdesk.
- Enable privileges to allow agents to cancel orders, or better yet, create new orders, apply a discount, send an invoice, and reply to the customer.
Equipping your team with all of the right tools and information they need to deliver great experiences ultimately helps you build a better brand experience and provide the highest level of service to your customers.
Learn more about how CQL can help design your customer service experience!
