How eCommerce Stores Can Improve Customer Service Experience

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Customer service experience

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Customer service is an integral aspect of every business. It doesn’t matter if your business is online or offline. For your business to succeed, you must be willing to make your customer service experience bar none. For eCommerce stores, it becomes even more imperative.

With brick and mortar stores, there is ample interaction with customers so customer service is naturally fluid. But with online stores, the lack of physical interaction elevates the bar of customer service experience needed to dominate.

In this post, we’re going to give out tips on how eCommerce stores can improve customer service experience and increase their business.

Tips to Improve Customer Service Experience for eCommerce Stores

The following tips are a helpful guide to improve the customer service experience for your eCommerce store.  They include:

  1. Ask Your Customers for Feedback
  2. Offer Free Shipping
  3. Have a User-Friendly eCommerce Site
  4. Provide Enough Information
  5. Grow an Active Community on Social Media
  6. Be Available for Your Customers
  7. Market with Engaging Contents
  8. Follow Up on Your Customers

1. Ask Your Customers for Feedback

Customer feedback is just about the most reliable way to find out how your customers feel about your product, service, and brand generally.

The feedback you collect from your customers should be used as a guide to improving your overall customer service experience. Hubspot has these helpful 16 strategies to obtain customer feedback.

2. Offer Free Shipping

Research by Stitch Labs found that retailers who offer free shipping make 10% more sales than those who don’t.

Note that free shipping in itself improves customer service experience; it’s a marketing tactic intended to compel the customer to convert. It’s been proven time and again that free shipping influences consumers ’ buying decisions.

Consumers would rather spend more on products with free shipping than spend less on products without free shipping.

3. Have a User-Friendly eCommerce Site

A great deal about your customer service experience depends on the user-friendliness of your eCommerce site. During our comparison of eCommerce SEO vs Regular SEO, we found that website architecture plays a big role in user experience.

To increase your conversion rate and keep your existing customers satisfied, you must invest heavily in an easy-to-navigate eCommerce site.

That is why eCommerce websites should have a unique SEO strategy. This will not only reduce your shopping cart abandonment rate by customers but will reduce unnecessary interaction with customers who encounter difficulties while using your site.

4. Provide Enough Information

Providing your customers with enough information is a very crucial step in delivering great customer service experience.

This includes providing detailed information such as your return policy, warranties, guarantees, or generally any information that could affect your customer service experience.

While there will always be disgruntled customers in every business, providing the right kind of information beforehand exonerates you of any blame arising from any improper use of your service.

5. Grow an Active Community on Social Media

Invest in an active community on social media. This helps engage your customers with your content while at the same time creating a buzz around your brand.

Social media as it is today has removed the traditional communication barrier that formerly existed between brands and their consumers and has created a more convenient avenue for communication.

What this means for brands is that more people are reaching out to you with inquiries and feedback via social media.

A new study by SocialMediaToday to examine how brand engagement on social influences purchase behavior revealed that 74% of people now follow brands on social media and 96% of those who do follow brands also interact with them on social platforms.

Also, consumers are more likely to recommend a brand to others after they have interacted with them on social media.

6. Be Available for Your Customers

Being available for your customers is the extra mile you must go to deliver excellent customer service to your customers.

When you stay reachable for your customers, it helps you earn their trust and establish credibility over time.

For example, if you run an eCommerce store where you live in a different time zone with your customers, you should make extra provisions to be available at their time.

7. Market with Engaging Contents

A blog will no doubt be beneficial for your eCommerce site. However, some people admit that they lack both the time and commitment required to sustain a blog.

At the end of the day, the idea is to market your eCommerce store with content that engages your customers. If you feel uncut for blogging, you should consider using other visual content strategies for your marketing.

Well, captioned images and videos have proven to capture and sustain people’s attention better than textual content.

Using such cryptic contents in your content marketing is a strategy to inform and at the same time motivate your site visitors to actually buy.

8. Follow Up on Your Customers

Do a follow up on your customers as soon as they leave your store. You are likely to turn all customers that buy for the first time into repeat customers if you follow up on them.

The idea is to follow up on customers when the memory of you is still very fresh in their minds. You don’t have to wait till the end of the month or quarterly to send out some dry promotions and general newsletters.

Offering your customers some great deals and mouth-watering offers like buy-2-get 1 free, free shipping, etc. after their first buy are some great ways to make your customer feel the depth of your customer service.

Final Notes

Creating a great customer service experience for your customers should be high on your list if you want to succeed with your eCommerce store.

The above tips on how eCommerce stores can improve customer service experience show you how the big guns do it.

The key is to analyze your set strategy every step of the way while finding more creative ways to improve on them as you move along.

With the proper application of this customer service experience improvement tips for eCommerce sites, your customers will stay hooked on your brand and always come back to shop.

Hassan Mansoor
Hassan Mansoor is the Founder and Director at Technical Minds Web. After completing Masters in Business Administration, he established a small digital marketing agency with the primary focus to help the small business owners to grow their online businesses. Being a small entrepreneur, he has learned from project management, and day to day staff management and staff productivity. He's a regular contributor on Business.com.

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