The best customer experience is one where the consumer does not have to reach out to a support group at all! When you do need assistance from an ecommerce customer service team, not all experiences are created equal. Here are 5 ways you can improve your customer service experience and set yourself apart:
1. Make It Easy
Customer ease is what yields customer loyalty. While it is important to delight your customers with your product offering and capability, what is even more valuable is making sure that their experience is low effort when they need to contact you. Make it easy to get in touch with your support team and state their issue. Make sure that your services do not require your customer to switch channels or repeat their issue more than once.
2. Provide Options
In order to tailor the support experience to varied preference, meet your customer where they are and provide several options for assistance. This could include Omni-channel options like live chat and social media as well as self-service options.
3. Be Transparent
Your customers don’t know what they don’t know (about your processes). Be transparent about when they should expect to hear back from your team and what your estimated resolution time frame looks like. Better still, be proactive – if you can notify your customers in advance of a delay or impact of their package, you have saved them the effort of looking into it themselves.
4. Personalize the Experience
Just because we are living in a virtual world does not mean our customer experience interactions have to be devoid of personalization. In fact, a personal touch should be even more top of mind. Even if you have decided to utilize chat bots or templates to provide a more efficient experience, there are still ways to make sure your customers feel valued and important – starting with using their name and making sure that your teams are taking care to spell customer names correctly and accurately.
5. Follow Up and Follow Through
Remember the old adage ‘say what you mean, mean what you say?’ This certainly applies when it comes to customer support. Make sure that you are closing the loop with your customers and even anticipating what questions they may ask next. If you do not yet have a resolution, keep your customer updated so that they feel confident that you are advocating for their issue.
