4 ways to improve your ecommerce customer service

It’s a nightmare for customers when they don’t find immediate support from ecommerce shopping sites. Yet, ecommerce customer service is one of the neglected strategies. Sure, you plan the most obvious facets of ecommerce, like products to sell, setting the right prices, ensuring inventory, the website’s UX, and whatnot. But, ecommerce customer service is something only a handful of ecommerce brands take seriously. So, here’s a blog that will talk about the benefits of providing excellent online support service and the best way to set it up.

What is ecommerce customer service?

The term ecommerce customer service sounds very basic and self-explanatory, but the process is far from simple. It covers a vast array of support expected by ecommerce shoppers. From finding the right product size, providing payment assistance, resolving issues post-purchase, and requesting a purchase history, it focuses on every aspect of the customer purchase journey. 

A recent survey found that 83% of shoppers feel customer service is an important factor driving purchase decisions. Ecommerce businesses that equally prioritize and invest in solid ecommerce customer support grow at an unmatched speed. Customers need to know that you will deliver quick support and issue resolutions to buy from you, not just once but on repeat. Shoppers might let go of faulty or wrong products being delivered to them, but they never compromise on the quality of the support. And rightly so. If shoppers choose to do business with you in such a saturated market, it is your responsibility to ensure they get a smooth shopping experience.

Why does upgrading ecommerce customer service matter?

Acquiring new customers and retaining existing customers is always a challenge in a crowded online marketplace. No matter how good a brand’s visibility and reach are, business growth depends on the customer experience it offers. With evolving technology, like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, offering top-notch ecommerce support has become painless. Here’s why you must provide excellent customer support:

1. Best way to grow your ecommerce business

What’s the reason people prefer one brand over another? Pricing? Yes. Quality? Yes. However, the most important reason is brand trust. There’s a reason why brands like Amazon have become market leaders. Customers trust Amazon to provide the right deals, quality products, and services, but more importantly, because their customer care is incomparable.

2. Boosts your social media presence

As quick as people are these days to take their grievances to social media, they also appreciate and share positive experiences online. Most online shoppers need social proof, such as customer reviews on the product, the delivery, and the ease of customer support provided. It is one of the key factors that drives customer decision-making. 

So, if you have a seamless customer support process, you’re bound to shine online and gain new customers looking for a trustworthy brand. Positive reviews will speak for themselves, and you will see a definite increase in your revenue.

3. Helps build a loyal customer base

If a company can improve its customer retention by just 5%, it can boost profits anywhere between 25% and 95%.

This probably goes without saying! Shoppers are more likely to refrain from experimenting with brands while purchasing online. They are always looking for an ecommerce brand that delivers an overall positive experience throughout the purchase cycle. Imagine they find your brand and are completely satisfied with the experience. Why wouldn’t they return the second, third, or a zillion times?

4. Can potentially maximize your revenue

At the end of the day, it comes down to one question for every online ecommerce business. And that is how to increase revenue effectively. While this question requires a lot of planning, strategizing, and decision-making, executing the plan and seeing it through is quite challenging. It’s good that companies now leverage ecommerce solutions to streamline the most crucial processes.

As you get more reviews and recommendations from shoppers, you attract more customers to buy your products. 68% of shoppers say they are willing to buy more from brands with a good reputation for seamless customer support.

How can you improve customer service for your ecommerce business?

There is only one thing that can make customer support prompt and error-free: ecommerce automation. Customer support services help ecommerce businesses drastically reduce manual efforts, costs, and poor customer experiences. Here’s how customer support services help improve the quality of support and boost customer satisfaction:

1. Offer uninterrupted support 24/7

There is no designated time for shopping. People may shop in the afternoon, at midnight, or at any hour of the day. Similarly, when it comes to resolving issues related to a purchase, shoppers cannot be expected to follow a fixed schedule. Your customer service should be available to them throughout the day and week.

2. Reduce your response time 

When customers face an issue with a product, they are already disappointed in the product, your brand, and your services. At this point, faster response times from the customer support team are highly appreciated and might help avoid further damage to the brand’s reputation. 

Generally, shoppers expect the response time to be a few minutes to an hour. It’s easy to respond instantly via chat support, but email and call support are usually not this quick. Therefore, with ecommerce automation, you can streamline the monitoring and allocation of emails and phone calls to your support team based on the concern.

3. Follow a multichannel customer support strategy

Multichannel ecommerce brands and retailers know the pain of managing customer support on each sales channel individually. Not only is it time-consuming, but the customer experience also takes a hit. So, what must brands do? The solution is centralization. Integrating with a customer support system to centralize all the touchpoints – chat, email, and calls will give you better visibility. This way, you can ensure that all customers’ issues are instantly responded to and resolved.

4. Leverage a fully automated customer support solution

Implementing an AI-based ecommerce solution will help you scale your business. Of course, it will be a somewhat huge investment, but if effectively implemented, it will bring a good ROI. There are many ecommerce solution providers that offer automated customer support solutions to brands and retailers. You can choose a scalable solution for your business that is built on AI and provides call, email, and chat support options. Or you can even choose to outsource the customer support process.

How do ecommerce customer support services work?

Artificial intelligence has revolutionized customer support services and is vital in streamlining call, email, and chat support. Ecommerce brands and retailers can transform customer support by leveraging AI-backed services and eliminating operational bottlenecks. So, let’s explore how exactly AI enhances different types of customer support.

Customer Call Support

AI helps set up a cloud call center to manage customer queries and automate the call support process. An AI-backed help desk support solution can train bots using NLP (Natural Language Processing) to categorize and respond to common customer queries. For more specific or difficult issues that require human interaction, it can route the calls to the relevant support representatives for quick resolution.

Customer Email Support

NLP has enabled companies to cut down on manual work and scale ecommerce customer service seamlessly. AI-integrated customer support solutions train bots using NLP to classify emails and extract vital information to create quick and relevant responses. Companies save a lot of time by automating these email responses while the customer enjoys quick handling time. For more complex emails, the bots forward the queries to customer care agents, enabling a smoother resolution.

Customer Chat Support

Automation is most commonly and widely used in chat support across industries. Almost every website today has a virtual assistant to offer a personalized, real-time response. In ecommerce, automated live chat support is very crucial as customers look for instant resolution. Here, the bots are trained with data to interact with customers based on their concerns or issues. 

When companies follow a streamlined approach to managing their customer concerns, it is easier to monitor and analyze the quality of the service they provide and to further optimize it.

Ready to improve your ecommerce customer support?

A simple switch to automation can transform how your ecommerce business operates and performs in the highly competitive space. If you want to optimize how your customer service process works, we can help!

Mobius is a pioneer in data and automation technology with 20+ years of experience from which your business can benefit. Connect with us to discuss your challenges, and we will support you with a customized ecommerce solution to take your business to the next level.