It is no secret to any ecommerce owner that customer experience plays an extremely important role in selling online. Studies state that more than 86% of customers are ready to pay more money when they are served with a better experience. Customers love getting online services and products. However, there is something more important and valued by online customers, great customer support. Ecommerce owners spend millions of dollars per year to deliver seamless customer service to their consumers. If you give out of the box customer service, the revenue and the benefits go above the bar and most importantly set you apart from the rest in the market. Do you remember the last time you experienced the best customer experience as a consumer? The feeling you got would be incomparable, right? That is the kind of experience you need to provide as an online seller to your consumers. In this article, we will be discussing what makes a good online customer experience.
What is the customer experience?
Before diving into the steps that help create a good online customer support experience, let us first know about what customer experience is. Customer experience is also termed as CX. It is termed as the experience and interaction your customers experience with your ecommerce business throughout their customer journey, right from the customer’s first contact until they turn into a loyal and happy customer. CX is the core to CRM or Customer Relationship Management as the customers that experience positive response from your business is more likely to become your loyal customer for the long run. Moreover, good customer experience greatly impacts the buyers’ decision to stay loyal. In simple words, in order to get loyal customers for a business, it is essential to provide quality customer experience.
What are the ways to enhance customer support experience?
Customer support experience is to be created by the whole ecommerce company by which they need to adhere by serving the interests of the customers. There should be a dedicated team that looks after the customer support in order to handle all the customer queries and complaints quickly and easily. Here are a few ways by which any online seller can enhance their ecommerce businesses’ customer support experience:
Build a Customer Support Strategy
The first step towards providing a good online customer support experience is to build a strategy for it. For building a strategy, your vision must be customer-focused on which you can work to fulfil the needful. By creating a framework, you will easily know the direction you need to follow in the entire process of providing quality customer support experience to your consumers. You need to be clear with your principles and should be ready to change any time.
Know your Products
When working in the customer support team, you must make sure to troubleshoot the problems faced by customers, and for that, you need to be an expert in your products. Expansive knowledge of your products is a crucial skill for providing quality customer support experience. Mainly, you should be able to discuss the features of the products, show how beneficial the products shall be for the customers, and solve their queries with the best efficiency instantly or at least at the earliest possible. Moreover, you must be always ready to troubleshoot any problems if aroused. You must be able to help customers attain the best from their purchases and make them feel that they have got real value for the money they invested. The highest benefit of knowing everything about your products is that you can give timely recommendations to your customers when they need it the most.
Analyze the Survey Results
Customer surveys are the experiences recorded by the customers based on their score of satisfaction from the ecommerce service. Such surveys provide insights to your customers’ experience with your business as well as your brand for the products or services you offered. There are many online tools available for measuring the customer experience that can help you learn the probability of them promoting your brand to their friends, family, near and dear ones. Multiple factors impact the customer experience you provide. Therefore, you shall need to take an aggregate of all the factors in order to learn the areas where you need improvement while servicing online. You shall need to focus on the performance of each factor in order to provide a smooth customer support experience.
Address the Customers Rightly
Addressing your customers using their names, help in providing them with a personalized customer support experience. Whether you are interacting with your customers via phone, emails, live chats or even customer surveys, you must make sure to take a friendly approach to humanize the consumer interaction. Research states that usually, people get overjoyed when they are addressed by their name. Therefore, make sure that you are creating a wonderful customer support experience for your consumers using a personalized approach. You can consider sending personalized messages and emails to your customers when they sign up or raise a query. By doing so, you may or may not receive a reply or earn a customer; however, it will surely create a positive impact on your brand as well as your business.
Listen to your Customers
As customer support, you must listen out to what your customers want to say. Generally, when a customer approaches the support team, they would be either upset or angry. They are trying to connect with you to get their issues addressed and a solution to the problem. Shortly, they want you to listen to their problem, address them, acknowledge the problem, and provide the necessary solution. Automated answers are not even close to providing quality online support services. You must make sure to hear out to your customers completely without any interruptions, be it their anger, or be it their worries regarding your services. Your customers must know anyhow that you are listening to them and that you are working on resolving their queries.
Respond Quickly
Studies have showcased that about 80% of customers press the back button when they do not get a human-to-human interaction. Automated messages or computerized calls do not deliver the best experience to your customers. As an online seller, you must know that customers’ time is valuable or at least they want it to be like that. Therefore, responding to their queries instantly will let them know that you value their issues and that will help you get more loyal customers. Even if it takes a longer time to resolve an issue, be transparent with them and keep them in the loop. By doing so, you are assuring them that they have been heard and that they can stay assured.
Ask your Customers
Creating a good customer support experience is and must be customer-centric. Therefore, you must ask your customers whether they understand what you are trying to convey. No online seller would want their customer to understand that they are getting a 50% discount when they are offered discounts up to 50%. As an online seller, you must make sure that the customer support team is conveying the right message in a subtle and easily understandable way. Also, the support team must confirm if the customer has understood that has been said and that they are clear of queries before ending any conversation.
Know that Customer Support is a Continuously Growing Process
If you have already been in the online selling, you might have already met customers of various kinds in your ecommerce store. An online seller must acknowledge and accept the fact that every customer is unique and so are their requirements and expectations from the customer support team. In order to handle customers in all their moods and satisfy them, you must be willing to keep learning as well as updating your customer support services. You must try to understand your customers’ varying requirements and find ways to address and satisfy them.
Take Follow-Ups
Following up after resolving an issue is a great way to earn loyal customers for your ecommerce store for the long run. You need to ensure with your customers that their problems are not reoccurring and that they are satisfied with your support system. You can consider giving them a call or sending them a good customer support email or ask them for filling up a survey or feedback form. This will let your customers’ know that you still care for them and that they can rely on you in case of need. Every good online customer support experience is a result of following up and taking care of the customers delicately.
Conclusion
The expectations of online customers are on the rise for almost a decade. In order to survive in the highly-competitive ecommerce world, you must stay above the bar to meet your customers’ expectations and satisfy them for your mutual benefits. When you meet customer expectations, the chances of them sharing their positive experience through word of mouth increases significantly. Customer support experience is an area that needs continuous and dedicated attention. If you are practising all these ways for creating good online customer support experience, you will experience a whopping rise in your revenue.
