Customer Support Tips For Online Business

Being an offline business requires you to have a functional address, phone number, and a customer care agent. But operating online comes with its challenges in providing excellent customer care services as you won’t make face-to-face contact with your customers. Customer services can be a pain in the neck as you’ll have to establish trust and turn it into increased sales.

And one of the biggest hurdles with selling your products the e-commerce way is a lack of face-to-face interactions in your customers that can result in poor customer service. Therefore, making your customer service best should be a priority as you’ll want to improve your services and not sell products only. The good news is there are ways of enhancing your business customer care services to enable you to remain top in the industry.

How is Online Businesses customer service different?

There is various type of businesses, and each employs a unique customer service strategy. Those approaches that work for large brands may be less effective for small brands. And since, e-commerce dominantly an online service; you have to make your customers’ online purchasing journey easier to ensure they are satisfied with your services. From navigating to your site to looking for products, adding them to cart, and finally buying them, a reliable customer care service will be of great help.

Besides, unlike brick and mortar stores, e-commerce businesses cannot interact with their shoppers directly; they rely on reviews, comments, live chats, and email forms to interact with their customers. Each stage of online customer service has a huge impact on the outlook of your brand and determines whether a customer will be willing to shop again or even recommend your business to friends or family.

According to a study, 56% of customers who receive poor customer services will never shop in the retailer again, and 52% of them share a bad experience with their friends and family. Therefore, if you are not providing customer support services of the desired levels, then your business could be getting damaged in many ways.

Seven Tips for Providing Reliable and High-Quality Customer Service Online.

1. Eliminate common questions immediately

You should include a FAQ (frequently asked questions) on the bottom page of your e-commerce site. This enables the customers to get a solution for many of common queries, including warranty information, return policies, and other relevant information related to your products or services.

Create a list of well-detailed FAQs with the help of your customer care staff. They should include all the commonly asked questions customers and answers to these questions. That way, the support channels will not be flooded by a large number of customers looking for solutions to the same issues.

2. Respond instantly

Have you tried submitting an online request and failed to receive a response even after 24 hours. Or did you get one telling you that someone will respond to you in about 24 hours? Well, this is an example of poor customer services. If the customers have to wait for almost two days to get a solution to their problem or answer to their queries, then they’ll opt for a competitor. Instead of telling the customers that you will respond within a specific time frame, respond to them right away or in the shortest time possible.

3. React even quicker on social media

About half of U.S consumers complain, pose questions, and even write their reviews on social media. And though you might not offer the customers solutions through social media, you can at least give them another platform to get help. You can do this by sending the customer the support email address or a ticketing system to connect them with your support team for more assistance.

4. Take customers’ privacy seriously

Recently, I made contact with a company after they sent me an incomplete package. And when I interacted with them via their “live chat” feature, one of their representatives started asking me about my credit card number to enable them to check my order. I was alarmed and refused to offer it, and after some discussions with the agent, I was able to get my full order. But I vowed never to do any business with the company again as they don’t value the confidentiality of their customers’ payment information.

So, never ask the customers any personal information that is a bit sensitive. This is because it will expose them, which will make them lose trust with your business and look for a competitor to business.

5. Use third-party customer-service software

Instead of spending a myriad of resources on developing a customer support system, that may less effective; you can rent some platforms with great time-management and organization tools that’ll ensure the best customer services. These third-party options include Zendesk, which comes with many great features to enable you to offer the best customer care services to your customers.

6. Help Your Customers Help Themselves

Some of your customers will have unique concerns and issues. But most of them will pose questions that are already in the commonly asked questions page, i.e. payments, warranties, and return policy. For the general questions, direct the customers to the relevant section which will eliminate the support team receiving multiple similar issues that will make them tired. Therefore, they will have to handle the complex issues and won’t have to contend with slow responses. The support team can then receive special requests and address them.

7. Consider the Entire Customer Journey

Even when looking for new ways of improving the services of your company, you should be ready to go outside the box to help your customers who have some issues. That is, you should engage with your customers through your social media pages, via newsletters and more. Over time, customers will feel closer to your brand, and your customer services will generally improve translating to more business sales.

Customer service is one of the most important aspects of a company as it determines whether the company will retain its customers and attract new ones. Therefore, each online business should emphasize this part to ensure they provide reliable and high-quality support services to both staff and customers.