30-Second Summary:
Being able to offer your customers the best experience possible is very important. Without a focus on the customer experience, brands run the risk of losing out to competitors that do, losing out on both a customer’s ongoing loyalty and sales. With your website key to being able to engage customers and build brand loyalty, customer satisfaction has to be part of any ongoing eCommerce customer service strategy, so what do you need to have to offer an enhanced service?
As the competition online intensifies, modern eCommerce brands need to be able to quickly and effectively resolve issues, answer customer questions, and provide personalised experiences that set their business apart. As there are more ways than one to approach this, below are some of the essential strategies you’ll want to consider to enhance your eCommerce customer service efforts. When done effectively alongside your ongoing SEO agency strategy, you can drive targeted traffic and have users enjoy enhanced CX throughout your site.
Customer service has always been important, well before the days of online experiences and social media. The expectation is high, with 73% of customers saying experience is an important factor in their purchasing decisions alongside price and product quality. Getting it right is crucial especially due to the effortlessness customers have when online and seeking a particular product or service – if the experience isn’t quite right for them, they’ll simply find another website.
It’s not only about grabbing their attention and bringing in the right traffic, it’s equally about keeping customers engaged and willing to be a repeat customer. Knowing your customers’ needs and preferences is crucial for tailoring the experience and delivering effective customer service for eCommerce. This is where gaining customer insights and analysing the data will help, quickly showing you what customers expect from brands today.
You’ll be able to identify common pain points, what their preferred communication channels are, and the types of support your customers value most. For some, they may prefer quick interactions via social media or a useful chatbot, while others may appreciate more direct contact by being able to speak to someone or through emails. Rather than guessing, it’s best to find out so that you can avoid offering a service change or enhancement that your target customer isn’t interested in or is simply not better than your competitors.
Being responsive and not keeping customers waiting longer than necessary is essential for customer service in eCommerce. One of the best ways to provide this is to have a network of support channels that can provide immediate help, reducing wait times and improving customer satisfaction. These days, there are many more options compared to just phone calls and emails, so being able to offer the channels that your customers want the most can help provide them with the best eCommerce customer service experience.
Customers are 2.4x more likely to stay when companies solve their problems quickly, so the expectation for a fast response is high. This is where an omnichannel approach can work wonders, especially when you consider most traffic is coming from mobile and tablet devices.
Live chat, email, and telephone support all cater to different customer preferences, so having a mixture can ensure you’re not neglecting any of your audience when they want to contact you. Having a chatbot can also help answer common customer queries, helping to free up more time for staff to be more productive with more complex queries. This can also enable brands to offer 24/7 responses to common queries, further improving CX.
Of course, having an omnichannel experience for your customers only works if it all works seamlessly on your website. It needs to be cohesive just in case a customer switches from messaging their query to then needing to speak to a human customer service agent. A live chat or chatbot feature needs to work without issue, especially during out of hours support.
Having helpful FAQs on your website is another opportunity to answer common questions customers may have about your product and services that can streamline the process. Any information you can provide here such as delivery information can help customers find this quickly without having to search the website or contact you. Overall, you want to provide multiple options that make the experience more satisfying.
If you’re looking at how to improve customer service in eCommerce, personalisation is important, with customers seeking out tailored experiences. 76% of customers expect personalisation, so when a brand doesn’t offer this it can play into the hands of competitors that do. Personalising interactions for customers makes them feel more familiar and that a brand understands them better.
Using customer data, experiences can be tailored based on aspects like their purchase history, their demographic and how they interact with your website including any previous communication. All of this means you can provide the best eCommerce customer service that connects with individual customers by offering better recommendations, personalised communication and even exclusive offers (such as a birthday discount code). Customers will feel more valued, and this can help improve brand loyalty.
Also, if they do reach out to speak to your customer service team, this information will be available to them to help personalise interactions further, being able to address customers by name and seeing information from previous communication. Even the content they see in email marketing can be tailored to their preferences, so having this personalisation can make a big difference.
Rather than a one-time process, improving customer service for eCommerce websites is an ongoing effort, and this is where customer feedback can be extremely valuable. Companies that actively seek this feedback can make quicker improvements to their service, identifying pain points faster than if they wait to hear from customers. When you consider that 56% of customers will rarely or never complain about a negative customer service experience, they’ll simply just look for another company to shop with, actively asking for feedback at different stages is beneficial.
Feedback can be gathered from customer surveys as well as reviews, and asked for through emails after a purchase or when signing up for a service. This direct feedback approach can help your website understand specific things about the customer journey, tailoring the questions around certain aspects of this. You can then use any feedback to help enhance the experience further, tweaking your website to help provide the best eCommerce customer service.
Taking a customer-centric approach when looking at how to improve customer service in eCommerce can ensure you’re always focused on providing a great experience and looking for ways to refine it. Just like with SEO, it can take time to improve but once you know where to look and how to provide a better service, this will strengthen brand loyalty in the long term.
Understanding your customers can help you fully provide the website experience they are looking for. If you have been looking at ways to improve your website, we can help with web design services that complement your SEO and PPC campaigns. We can show you where improvements can be made to provide the experience your customers expect and help with optimisation and personalisation of content, FAQs and CTA buttons that help guide customers.
Contact our digital marketing agency today for expert guidance and tailored solutions that can transform your customer service approach and drive your business forward. For further insights, please read all about SEO & mobile-first indexing and 5 of the biggest trends in Ecommerce SEO.
