Customer service is crucial for any e-commerce company. It plays a pivotal role in building customer loyalty, driving conversions and increasing repeat sales. It can be your most important marketing tool — one that touches the customer directly — and it can make or break your business.
As more traffic comes to your website, orders will likely start increasing, and as they do, you’ll probably get a higher number of inquiries from customers and potential customers. You’ll also have to deal with returns and implementing policies and processes correctly.
When you’re finally getting a lot of traffic to your e-commerce store and people are actually purchasing and recommending your product, you want to be able to get to all the messages as quickly as possible and provide an awesome experience for your visitors. You wouldn’t want to experience growing pains and drown in your success. Instead, you want to seize the opportunity and ride the wave.
In 2015, an online store based in California was quickly grabbing attention, so the company’s leaders came to us and hired a part-time assistant to help them reply to incoming messages and customer inquiries. Fast forward to 2018, and the client went from a part-time assistant to hiring seven of our full-time assistants. Besides customer service, our personnel also assisted the client with handling returns and refunds, among other things. The company’s focus on customer service, with our support, led to repeat sales, customer loyalty, client referrals and more than $15 million in annual sales.
From my experiences with clients like this, here are some best practices for how e-commerce stores can handle their own customer service.
1. Provide Outstanding Support
It’s important to provide great support to all customers and site visitors, but focus on those who don’t seem so happy — mostly the ones contacting the store looking for a return/refund for receiving a damaged or broken item. Handling their experience with empathy can prevent them from posting bad reviews about your business.
2. Interact After The Purchase
Many companies allow the relationship with the customer to end once they’ve paid and received the product, but it’s important to keep interacting with the customer to keep moving them from the customer stage to the loyalty stage. If you manage to convert a happy customer into a valuable and loyal customer, they can provide powerful word of mouth.
3. Keep Your Team Happy
Your customer service team is the face of the company to the customer. If your team members are unhappy, they may not have the best attitude when dealing with customers. It’s important that your team members work in a comfortable environment, are compensated well and have goals and incentives.
Customer service has become a key factor in online marketing. Long gone are the days of one-way communication channels. Today, your ideal customer is online, interacting with your brand, reviewing products and services, and making buying decisions. Try to get your entire organization involved in customer service. If you know who your ideal customer is and what their pain points and interests are, then your entire team — from your website designer to your customer service staff — can work to provide the best experience possible.
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