The sole reason for you to make your presence online is to provide good service to your customers or viewers. This rule not only applies to big industries but to small start-ups as well. Even blog writers while creating a post take ample time to think about the type of article that would bring forth ample traffic and in turn increase their revenue.
But providing good service isn’t enough, you need to make sure that you continue to do so and also provide required aids and resolve queries when such situation arises. Such support provided by you that doesn’t directly impact their cause is known as customer support. In this post we would dive in and discuss in detail why there is dire need of quality and continued customer support and prove tips to improve your customer service standards.
(1) Why the need for ecommerce customer service?
What, wasn’t serving my audience and fulfilling their request enough? Why should I help them and solve their queries, if it might not even prove to be fruitful for me?
Well, frankly speaking, these are the right queries, but to truly understand the reason why people invest so much time and money for excellent customer support you must know the reason why customer support is required in the first place.
You get your audience basically from three sources:
a – Existing customers
b- New customers
c- Potential customers
The customer service provided to these three sources are completely different. For existing customers, you provide customer support to resolve their queries and help them in case they face any issue regarding their present user experience. This is generally done via mail or by contacting helpdesk (online/ via telephone).
You attend to new customers and make sure that their experience while they venture through your website remains glitch free and smooth. You tend to guide them through every steps and hurdles, by making use of chat option or FAQ.
For potential customers, the customer service already provided to existing and new customers tend to do the job. After all mouth to mouth publicity makes has the most influence and makes the biggest impact. Also, you maintain a detailed blog linking to your website, that caters to important queries and doubts and provides a path to your website. And the most important parameter being, you never impose any decision on them.
In this way proper customer service standard uplifts your business’s revenue and also increases your fan base.
(2) What are the different methods to provide excellent ecommerce customer service?
Thanks to the advancement in technology, you do not always need to consider your customer service to be confined to telephonic assistance. Now the tech savvy generation has embraced a number of ways of providing quality customer service that not only saves you a lot of money but also provides help to your customers almost instantly. Some of such means are
– Online Chat – Online chat is a great way of getting hurdles cleared while online. Your customers can reach out any point of time, from anywhere and get their queries answered.
– Helpdesk – Email helpdesk has been there for a long time, but continues to be the best customer service. After receiving a query, via email you can invest time to provide the best possible answer. Also, you can ask your customers to provide valuable feedbacks which can help you business cater to their needs in a much better fashion.
– Telephonic assistance – You can also opt for telephonic assistance, where customer service is provided over the phone, but it may or may not be a round the clock service.
– FAQ – Frequently asked questions are also a great way to provide quality customer service. In this case the most prevalent and often encountered issues are logged and displayed on your website so that other users can be benefited by it.
– Blogs – Blog is a great platform to not only communicate with your customers and provide them the attention they deserve, but it also a great channel of providing in depth customer service. You can explain scenarios in details and also provide steps to elevate recurring problems.
(3) How to communicate with customers?
Be it face to face or on the virtual world, responding properly to your customers goes a long way. It not only instils faith in your customers but enhances the user experience as well. According to a survey, every hassle free customer service is most likely to turn into a possible sale and a future recommendation by the customer.
Hence the best customer service tip is to communicate kindly and often if a query is received from the customer, you should be polite, be it verbal or textual format. You should solve their problem gracefully, and ensure that they don’t undergo much hassle while following your instructions. Step by step explanation is a great approach.
Also you need to contact with your customers once in a blue moon to show that your business cares for its customers, and ask if they were facing any problem recently. But make sure that you don’t bother them with frequent calls or email.
And at the end show your eagerness to help them in the near future by using the best customer service sentence of all times, “Let me know, if I may be of any further assistance”.
We at Avactis believe that good customer service is a key to successful business. We make sure that all our customer queries are sorted out.
If you have any questions for us, feel free to get in touch with us.