Successful eCommerce businesses all have at least one thing in common: great customer service. The interaction may be virtual, but customers still demand high quality ecommerce customer service that feels personal and authentic. And this matters more than ever, because 95% of shoppers will tell others about a bad customer service experience. It’s never been easier to express your displeasure online. Conversely, 52% will actually purchase more if they have a positive customer service experience. So how do you improve customer service for an eCommerce business?

How to Improve Customer Service

To retain high-value customers, you’ll need to make communication as easy and helpful as possible. Decreasing the time it takes to respond to customer queries can dramatically boost online orders. Sometimes a quick answer is all a shopper needs to convert. Whether it’s a fancy contact form or a chatbot, customers expect to be able to get their questions answered: Right. Now. A multi-platform approach to customer service means you can meet your customers where they are.

Most Popular Communication Channels 

Email 

With all of the existing transaction information delivered to a customer over email, like tracking numbers and order confirmations, email is still the dominant channel for a customer reaching back out to a brand for help or info. According to Hubspot, 62% of shoppers prefer to contact brands through email over any other method. Setting up a simple contact inbox and auto-generated ticket will help you organize and acknowledge your customers from the moment they reach out. You can reinforce the customer experience with calls-to-action in your transactional emails that guide customers to your team and reduce friction for customers at the initial point of contact.

Social Media Direct Messages

It’s important to meet your customers where they’re at. Since more and more customers are shopping with brands on social media, being able to respond to queries on those platforms is key to great customer service. Tools like Facebook Messenger allow you to respond to DMs immediately or with a customized auto-response. And if you're really invested, invest in a CRM. Platforms like Gorgias or Zendesk will integrate right into your inboxes so your customer experience team can field incoming messages from social media and email, all under one roof. 

Online Forms

Contact forms are a trusted and reliable way to hear out your customers' questions and concerns. It should be easy to find the necessary fields for your customer to explain their situation and get the help they need. 

Live Chat

Some customers prefer live chat over email, especially if a question pops up as they’re making a purchase. If you’re using any type of customer service software for chat, make sure it is sophisticated enough to allow customers to self-service—this will save you time and resources. And of course, to create a cohesive brand experience, your chatbot or AI agent should be customized to match your brand voice.

FAQs

Knowledge bases like FAQs, videos, and how-to guides are great for the 51% of customers who prefer troubleshooting on their own using an online guide from the company itself. This not only saves your team time, it often saves your customer time as well. 

Phone Calls

With the increasing shift to digital interaction, this may surprise you: 50% of customers prefer to contact customer service via phone call where there is a high urgency or high emotion issue. Allowing your customers to get someone on the line quickly for these urgent issues not only gives your brand credibility, it also makes them feel seen and heard.

Tips for Providing Excellent Customer Service

1. Act on Feedback 

It’s one thing to hear out customer complaints and concerns, but unless a company takes action to fix and prevent further issues, customers won’t be very happy. Putting yourself in your customer’s shoes is invaluable to understanding and accommodating their needs and preferences.

2. Train Your Staff to Empathize

No matter how well you run a business or how great your products are, you will inevitably get some complaints. Ensure that your staff understands that customers will be tense when explaining their issue. It’s important to always, always, always be polite. Always.

3. Go Beyond Onboard Training 

Continually emphasizing the end goal, to surpass customer’s expectations, is essential to creating a customer-first culture. It’s not something you can say once and never revisit. For great customer service to happen, your staff needs to have clear and achievable goals, all with the purpose of making your customers happy.

4. Communicate Clearly

Customer service is not the place to use jargon or insider terms, even in B2B customer service. Make sure your communication is clear and addresses your customer’s issue with empathy. A quick update on the progress of remediating their issue can change your customer’s emotional context dramatically. Knowing that your team is actively engaged in finding a solution keeps you on the same team with your customer and avoids an adversarial spiral.

5. Hire People with the Right Mindset

A customer-focused work culture starts with hiring the right people. It might sound self-explanatory, but the right temperament is just as important as the right training plan. High EQ and exceptional patience are two of the key attributes in a great customer service team member, and some personality qualities just can’t be taught. The next time you have a truly great customer service interaction of your own, consider recruiting that person to your team!

6. Answer Phone Calls

It should go without saying, but we’re saying it. Answer those phone calls! If you want to provide outstanding customer service, you’ll need to train your staff to see the importance of picking up the phone quickly and avoiding long hold times. Nobody likes to be put on hold. What’s worse than being on hold? No answer at all. There are even AI phone answering services now, so there’s no excuse for silence. Answer the phone!

7. Always be Honest

Honesty really is the best policy when it comes to eCommerce customer service. Customers aren’t stupid. They know when you’ve made a mistake. Instead of covering up a blunder, admit to it, apologize, then take action to correct the problem. Research suggests that a quickly and thoroughly resolved customer service issue can create higher brand loyalty for a customer than if no issue happened at all. 

8. Respond Quickly

Chances are, if your customer is contacting you, they need your help right away. Especially if they’re calling by phone! Be sure to respond to shoppers quickly and with helpful information. It’s especially important to give speedy responses on social media, particularly public mentions. While you may want to respond to a social media post quickly, also know when to take a conversation to private messaging. Some issues are too specific to be discussed in public without risking your brand’s reputation or disclosing private customer information.

9. Centralize Your Data

The key to closing tickets quickly is to allow your customer service agents—whether they are human or AI—to access the key information required to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. That’s hard to do if your order, inventory, product, and tracking information live in different systems. The best eCommerce customer service tools will centralize all of that information in one place, so that the answer to the customer’s question or issue is only a few clicks away.