With the advancement of technology, many of our tasks have become easier and convenient. One of the advantages provided by technology is thus the gift of e-commerce. To be able to open a virtual store using the mediums of the internet is an easy start up as well as the convenient method for both the buyers and the sellers.
Where everything has its pros and cons, e-commerce does too. With its many advantages, the inability of the company to speak to their customers face-to-face is a huge con. Due to this shortcoming, many businesses lose customers and end up having reduced sales. Moreover, with the ease of starting a business online, the number of competitors keep mounting up. In this case ensuring customer satisfaction can help you stand out from your competitors.
Here we list 10 valuable Customer Service Tips for your E-Commerce Store which will prove very beneficial to your company.
Customer service isn’t about telling people how awesome you are, it’s about creating stories that do the talking for you. We also tell some fascinating and heart-warming stories about exceptional customer service.
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Be responsive
We live in a world of instant communication. Making use of these modern features, communicate with your customers in real-time.
- By being responsive, we do not simply mean replying to the customer’s messages, but responding to them instantly and courteously. Providing a platform for online chat, you provide customers with trust and an endearing opportunity to get their queries sorted out. If you make them email you the query or their concerns, it’s a bit lengthy and boring method. Using the means of online chatting platform, be it WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook messenger, provide them an easy medium to speak to you.
- 77% of customers agreed that online chat positively influenced their attitude about the retailer. Live chat helps you and your team to be more productive, and also more consistent in your responses, as you can build in some pre-written responses. 84% of customers that reported being either likely or very likely to do business with a company if it responded via phone in less than a minute.
2. Post your FAQs
- Before starting your business, it is optimum and one of the basic things to ensure customer satisfaction is to create the page of frequently asked questions (FAQs) and prominently display it on your site/page. Place the FAQs where it can be easily seen and accessed by the customers. This will save you precious time spent in answering repeated questions. Think like a customer to understand his status and what question can pop in his mind.
- FAQs also help ensure quick communication to the customer, i.e. instead of making them wait for their queries to get cleared they can instant find solutions on the already created page.Maintain and keep updating it as your business grows.
3. Write a user-friendly returns policy
- Guarantees and warranties are the best way to ensure and get customer satisfaction. The return policy is part of doing business. Mostly business has conditions under which a product will be replicable or returnable. List these points in simple words that the customer can trust and understand.
- A customer bought an iPad online, then returned it to the company almost immediately, leaving a message that read, “Wife said no.” Apple VPs refunded the customer and returned the iPad with an attached Post-It that said, “Apple said yes.”
4. Display the billing history
- One of the convenient things you can do to not only ensure customer satisfaction but also do yourself a favor is by creating a billing history of each customer. Customers like to see how the bill have been charged to them. This includes showing shipping charges, payment method, and order status.
- Developing a billing history of all the sales of a customer builds customer’s trust in the business and also shows your efficiency. This helps both the customer and business realize that what a long and amazing journey they have had together. Also, questions about shipping and accounts can consume a lot of your time so displaying billing history saves that too.
5. Scale your team seasonally
During events and national holidays, hire extra labor to ensure satisfaction. During events such as Easter, Christmas, Valentines, start- of-year, and end-of-year high sales etc., handling the huge amount of orders, and answering all queries becomes challenging for the company. It has been observed that in many companies the service usually worsens during holiday seasons. To stop this from happening to your company, don’t take the risk but hire extra staff to handle and provide proper attention to your customers. This will also help develop a reputation about your company that no matter what season or which holiday, the quality of service from your company will always be outstanding and consistent.
6. Ask for feedback
- One of the most efficient ways of measuring customer satisfaction, and one of the most brutally honest too, is asking for feedback. This helps the admin realize what kind of service the employees are doing. Also, it gives you an opportunity to improve yourself.
- You can never think like a customer completely, so offering an opportunity for feedback gives you an insight into what they think about you.
- A three-year-old girl names lily left a message at Sainsbury, the grocery store in the UK, suggesting them to call their tiger bread, giraffe bread as there was more resemblance of the bread to the giraffe’s skin instead of tiger’s. The company entertained this message and were pleased to see this response coming from such a young kid. They change the name of the bread while giving credits to the little girl in the info section of the product.
7. Offer free shipping
As your business thrives, you should have the heart to offer free shipping or at least reduce the cost of shipping. This not only builds trust but also gets you, new customers. It can turn your current customers into permanent ones. Especially offering free shipping to old customers is a beautiful thing to do.
8. Prompt them will goodwill messages
- On national holidays and events, prompt your customer with kind greetings to let them know, the company still cares, thinks o you and remembers you.
- During Christmas season, it snowed heavily. A daughter was extremely worried about her father (89 years old) being alone, lacking food as it snowed heavily around his home in Pennsylvania. After calling multiple stores in a desperate attempt to find anyone who would deliver to her father’s home, she finally got ahold of someone at Trader Joe’s. Not only did Trader’s Joe ensured speedy delivery but also suggested additional delivery items that would fit perfectly with his special low-sodium diet.
To her pleasure, the employees wished the lady merry Christmas and delivered food free of charge.
9. Honor your old customers
Providing bonuses and offering discounts to your old customers is perhaps the best gesture for making them your life-long customers. This builds trust and love in the customer and it is most likely they will recommend your store to other people too.
10. Have a beautiful store
For people trading through e-commerce, their Facebook page or website is their store. To ensure the best customer service, you should have a well-designed website/platform which is not only pleasing to the eyes but also easy to understand and access. A site with a befuddling appeal is quick to confuse and disappoint the customer.
