How to Provide Exceptional Customer Service for E-commerce
Customer service is very significant especially today that almost everyone is connected to the internet. Exceptional customer service is crucial for customer satisfaction and retention, as well as profitability in the eCommerce industry.
Each product or service sold online is supposed to be backed up by a customer service as a part of its quality guarantee. A research report of American Express shows that 58% of customers are willing to spend more on companies that provide excellent customer service. Therefore, it is important to maintain the philosophy that every customer matters. Being extremely customer-focused offers huge success to your business.
Here are some of the best practices for exception customer service:
Provide an easy access contact information
If you want customers to come back, make the contact information easily available. There are limitless communication channels for providing support to customers of Internet related services. You may provide a live chat, contact or enquiry form, your business phone number or e-email address to handle support issues. Make sure customers shouldn’t encounter any trouble when trying to reach you.
Use social media
Be where your customers are. Many of them are on social media and providing customer service through social media such as Facebook and Twitter offers immediacy and tend to have better reputations than those companies that don’t. Social media is the new customer-service platform and business owners must have a plan in place to react and communicate.
Respond in a timely manner
Customers don’t like to wait! They want quick help, and you must provide it to them especially when a customer is requesting something that’s time sensitive. If you provide many communication channels, but you can’t handle them accordingly then increase your resources and staff to always provide an immediate and satisfying answer to customer’s specific query or a solution to their complaints. If you don’t provide 24/7 customer support, then you must provide a timeframe or a clear response time you work within to be able to respond to customers.
Provide FAQs
Providing frequently asked questions on your site have quite a lot of distinct benefits for you and for your customers. FAQs include the easy and frequent questions that customers ask. This way, you and your customers can save time because they would just click the FAQs to be able to quickly find the answers to their questions and it will also help to alleviate support debt. This means less time for you as a business owner in answering questions, and more time focusing on sales and marketing.
Implement 24/7 customer support
Being available 24/7 indicates high responsiveness. That’s why you must ensure a 24/7 customer support representatives working to quickly resolve any problem the customer might experience with the products or services they received. Customers view round-the-clock availability as one of the most valuable assets of a company and the faster the customer service is, the better the chances are for the company to keep customers.
Customer service is extremely a significant part of your eCommerce business. By investing in your customer service, you’ll not only increase your sales but most importantly, you’ll increase long-term loyalty of your customers.