Top 8 ECommerce Customer Service Best Practices to Follow

They can help the company fine-tune its strategy to customers’ needs, ensuring it’s a win-win for both parties. Excellent customer support and service are at the heart of great customer experiences. Companies that invest time and effort in enhancing their customer service are better positioned to foster a customer-focused culture across the organization. Delivering superior customer experiences is a great way to create this value and gain a competitive advantage against other players in the market. And great customer support and customer service are the cornerstones of a memorable customer experience.

• This can help your team identify any recurring issues and areas of improvement.
• Customers expect quick, easy, and effective support, and they’re willing to look elsewhere if they don’t get it.
• It gives customers a chance to explain their grievances with more clarity, and customer support agents to solve them, with more empathy and patience.
• Whatever system you use, the key is to make it easy to capture meaningful complaints and track the volume of customers who are bringing up similar or identical issues.

Find out what integrations are available that you can implement with your customer service software. It’s a great way to automate your business operations – improving your organization’s efficiency and productivity. Here, you can find the average response time by reporting period, by department or team and by individual agents. Insights from employees, product experts, and external partners will be key for creating help center articles and addressing common customer inquiries. They’re also helpful to agents as a reference point when they’re assisting customers. Customers, especially stressed customers, don’t always want to do what a support agent suggests, which means making a strong, reasonable case for why they should care.

Enhance your customer service strategy

Otherwise, there will be lackings between service and customers’ expectations and it will hurt you in the long run. According to Nextiva, 96% of consumers say customer service is an important factor in their choice of loyalty to a brand. Customers with good customer service usually stay with the store providing it. Good customer service meets the customer where they’re at, whether that’s online, over the phone, texting, social media messaging, live chat, etc. Consumers want to be able to fix solutions in a way that makes them most comfortable, and that’s different for each customer.

There’s nothing more frustrating than speaking with an ignorant service rep agent after waiting on hold for an hour. They must also know about the products and services their company provides so they can competently assist all customers and not have to pass them along to someone else. The ability to communicate clearly is a must for customer service reps. Your primary job is communicating with customers, often when they are upset.

Examples of Customer Query in a sentence

With more than 60 percent of customers reporting they now have higher customer service standards after the past year’s crisis, customer support teams need to be faster than ever. Without thorough knowledge about your product(s) and company, your customer service team won’t be able to respond to customer queries with clarity. The team must know the purchase process, product features, updates and specifications, company policies, etc. Over time, organizations realized that positive CX could benefit them as much as or even more than their conveniences, as happy customers could return and become loyal to the brand. From the time a customer complaint is first submitted to the moment it gets resolved, record your interactions with the customer.

According to a report by the marketing agency IMPACT, 75% of people don’t believe advertisements, but 92% believe brand recommendations from friends and family. Brands that ‘wow’ their customers with stellar customer service are bound to earn their respect and admiration by way of testimonials and referrals. The happier your customers, the more likely they are to maintain a long-term association with your brand. The amount of money a single client spends on your business during their association with you and lowers your operating costs to serve them. Businesses emphasize retaining their current customers because as per research, customer acquisition is anywhere between 5-25 times more expensive than customer retention. Brands spend considerable amounts of time and resources in building great products and marketing them.

How to answer the complex customer questions?

The true test of your customer support team’s competence is in how they deal with difficult customers. Customers may lose their cool because of a product or service issue that they might be facing or because they might be dissatisfied with your support quality. Whatever be the reason for their grievance, customer support agents must maintain their composure, and avoid getting defensive, as doing so will only exacerbate the situation. Customer service teams often also have to collaborate with other functions including engineering, sales, and marketing.

Enhance your customer service by understanding how your customers are feeling about their experiences. Get started quickly with SurveyMonkey’s expert-written customer satisfaction templates and solutions. There are numerous instances where customer queries can be efficiently resolved through self-service options like how-to guides and instructional videos.

Second, negative feedback is usually specific to a certain product or thing. During this follow-up, apologize again and make sure you’ve taken care of everything they needed. While it’s important to follow your company protocols and guidelines, it’s also important to be able to go the extra mile for your customers. Never offer a solution that you can’t follow through on, as that will only set you back. Perhaps offering a small gift card or a discount on future purchases will be enough to assuage the situation. You might also consider replacing the item for free or upgrading their future purchase or membership.

The quality of a company’s customer service — good or bad — can play a huge role in a company’s success. Of consumers, 60% have purchased something from one brand over another based on the service they expect to receive. In most customer service interactions, a customer reaches out to a company to make a request, ask a question, or note a complaint. A customer service representative then provides support, expertise, and assistance quickly. Simply put, customer service is helping customers solve problems, teaching them how to use products, and answering questions.