Setting up an online eCommerce store is possible on a limited budget and with the help of many online tools. However, you need to have a robust system to earn recurring revenue when getting sales and converting passive traffic to active users. And once you get customers, retaining them with relevant offers and strong customer support is vital. What’s also important is understanding the industry’s best practices concerning customer support that get you raving customers ready to spread the word about your business.
First, begin by knowing the challenges customers face in an online eCommerce store. Work towards improving the customer experience by giving them omnichannel support. If it is within your budget, look for call center support to enhance their experience. Make it worth their time by providing offers at different price points. This way, your customers keep coming back for better recommendations. Don’t shy away from experimenting with chatbots to improve user experience.
Before you invest in multiple customer support avenues, take stock of your investment by tracking KPIs and moving ahead with those that give you positive results.
But first, understand the challenges that are unique to your eCommerce store and how you can reduce or eliminate them for your customers.
Challenges Customers Face When Buying from eCommerce Stores
When customers come to your store, they are there because they are actively looking for a solution/product or passively browsing to learn more. Either way, they are looking to explore and get a solution to their immediate needs. En route, these are challenges you need to factor in resolving them.
- Lack of Sales Agent: The absence of a sales agent online leaves the user to figure out everything about a product. It takes more time and effort making it difficult for a user to make a buying decision.
- Unable to Try a Product before Trying: A casual shopper can pick and see/feel the product in a physical store. However, the lack of this experience makes it difficult to know if the product is a good fit.
- Damaged/Faulty Shipment: Often, damaged or faulty shipments leave behind a bitter experience, causing customers to switch to a different brand unless it is adequately taken care of.
- Customer Support for Order Issues: Many times, reaching a human to discuss order issues can quickly sort a problem for a customer. But the absence of customer support makes them move to another store.
How to Improve Customer Experience for eCommerce Businesses
Customers keep coming back for great offers, good price points, or excellent service. To continue providing top-notch service, consider keeping various customer support channels that make it easy to reach out promptly and resolve queries.
1. Go Omnichannel
Omnichannel: Prepare your marketing approach by considering an omnichannel strategy. An integrated, personalized approach allows customers to move seamlessly across multiple channels.
Multichannel: Another marketing strategy is the multichannel approach. Here you have multiple channels for your customers to interact with your brand. However, each channel has its system that works in silos, so a customer walking into a physical store might not be able to move his purchase and shop online.
Omni-Channel Benefits: Taking the omnichannel route has its benefits. It allows your customer to continue shopping even as they shift their attention from one channel (or the physical store) to another online channel.
Explore multiple ways to get in touch with the company, including an online help desk, live chat, on-site, email, phone, WhatsApp, etc. This way, you are constantly in contact with your customers. Rely on automation to get this working for you. If you’re looking beyond automation, invest in a call center team to keep in touch with your customers.
2. Invest in a Call Center Team
Availability of a Call Center: While investing in a call center team might mean more business investment, it allows you to understand where your business needs improvement. Constant customer communication makes it easy to iron out the issues and provide better feedback.
Bot & Human Intervention: Some customers prefer a live chat option over talking to a human. In contrast, others prefer a human over chatting with a bot. Make sure your call center team is equipped to manage both to integrate the experience so that the customer does not have to explain the issue each time they reach a new agent. If you have a small team, you may consider outsourcing your call center to a third party.
3. Offer generous returns and exchanges
Cost of doing business: Returns and exchanges are a part of doing business. There is a cost involved, but without this assurance, the conversion rate will plummet. Do not make it hard to return products. Make it simpler by following these steps.
Prominently display your return policy: Display your return policy on product pages in the larger text if need be, so the process is evident for users before purchase.
Mention the upfront costs: Often, costs can be a point of contention, leaving customers dissatisfied with the service. This situation can worsen when the costs are fine print, or the information is not available upfront. Avoid this case by making your costs information available upfront.
Make the timelines clear: Shipping time and costs might vary; hence make the timeline and cost clear, so your customers have trust and transparency.
4. Use the right KPIs to measure success
NPS: Net Promoter Score, also popularly known as NPS, may not be the sole metric to focus on. While it is a good starting point, keep track of other KPIs to measure success.
Other Metrics: Look at the average handling time for a customer. Identify the number of touchpoints for support resolution as well. This way, you know each customer has various channels to reach out and communicate with your business.
5. Use eLearning to train your support staff
Learning Material: Equip your team with the necessary learning material to know your product in and out. The support team needs to be well versed with your product and how it works. Use a combination of online learning tools and handouts to allow them to learn on the go as they handle customer queries.
Upgrade Training Material: Also, produce learning material at regular intervals so your team is up to date on the recent product version and can communicate effectively on these updates. This way, you can train your support staff on a scalable basis.
6. Know when and how to use Chatbots
Conversational apps are the future. But knowing when to use and not use chatbots is essential for your eCommerce store.
This is ideal to perform tasks that can be done without the need for humans (like logging a ticket, knowing a delivery date, etc.). Chatbots facilitate seamless customer service that eliminates tedious tasks. It saves you time and money, ensuring a better customer journey.
But they are not a replacement for a human agent. Make sure you always use a hybrid approach so that customers who want a human to talk to can do so easily.
7. Have SOPs for your Employee and Customers
Running an online store involves keeping track of your orders, employees, and customer service. To ensure a smooth service for all customers, put an SOP in place. SOP allows you to monitor employee performance and improve efficiencies. Bear these points in mind while creating your SOP.
Maintain SOPs for various scenarios: More the products, the greater the need for flexibility for the customer to engage and communicate their experience and feedback. Keep your employees in the loop on the SOP on this.
Issues and Resolution: Angry customers need resolution quickly. Have SOPs to control issues depending on the case. Inform employees of the best approach while facing regular customers and new customers. Each customer segment will have its problems to address.
Give agents the freehand: Often, issues remain pending for want of due authority or sign-off on the subject. Avoid such a scenario by giving agents the power to take a call on escalations and resolve with no manager intervention—this way, your employees feel empowered, and customers don’t have to wait long for their problem resolution.
Final Thoughts
Setting up customer support for your online store needs a fair bit of practice. Using some tried and tested best practices, you can take your customer on a frictionless journey. Start by identifying their challenges in your store and manage your orders so customers can communicate as and when they want through your omnichannel presence.
Invest in a call center to lend a human ear to their queries. Automate when required and outsource if need be. Ensure you have a return policy that spells out the cost and time. Remember to present offers that align with your customer journey. Use KPIs that track these offers and let you get a good ROI.
By investing in continuous training for your staff, you’ll be a step ahead in keeping your customers informed of your business as you scale. Use chatbots with discretion since people yearn for human interaction, mainly when escalations occur. SOPs, in such cases, can be a game-changer for your business and douse unexpected occurrences that can impact your business.
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