What is ecommerce customer service?
If you run an ecommerce store, you’re constantly engaging with your customers - resolving their issues, taking feedback on your products, informing them of the latest launches, etc. All of these activities fall under the umbrella of ecommerce customer service.
That’s right. It’s unavoidable & extremely instrumental to the success of your business. A survey shows that 84% of consumers consider customer service to be a key factor when deciding whether to purchase or not. That’s not all. An overwhelming 95% of consumers say that customer service is crucial for brand loyalty.
Needless to say, customer service should be on your top 3 list of things you focus on every day. Customer experience drives brand loyalty, uplifts sales, reduces churn, and determines the overall health of your ecommerce business.
Are there best practices in ecommerce customer service?
Yes, there are several best practices to optimize your ecommerce customer service game but know this: all ecommerce stores are different and best practices can vary with the type of business.
Having said that, here are the top 4 ecommerce customer service best practices to enhance your overall customer experience:
1. Be omnipresent
Your customers should be able to reach out to you across channels, viz. Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Messenger & Email. This is called omnichannel customer service. At DelightChat, we always advise our customers to be present across channels.
2. Respond faster
Your customers want answers yesterday. As a DTC store owner, you must keep an eye on your average response time. Try to be as responsive as possible and across channels. If you’re fielding hundreds of customer query every day, consider hiring someone to take some of that work off your plate. But either way, be fast in delighting your customers.
3. Be proactive
Being proactive is a sign of maturity for any ecommerce business. It indicates that you’re able to predict the ‘obvious’ queries even before they arise. To help you with that, you can add a knowledge-base or FAQ to your site. More often than not, customers want to solve their queries without your help and you can enable them to do that with a help center containing the most important (and common) questions.
4. Use automation (but don’t abuse it)
In this decade, companies are using automation front and center to help them ease their workload while being more efficient and productive. With tools like DelightChat, you can use simple automation like assigning a certain customer support query to a particular rep and automatically replying to an email query that’s asking a common question. However, don’t abuse automation. Your customers still want a human touch and no amount of AI can replace a human helping them out.
What software should you use to manage ecommerce customer service?
As you can see customer service is super important and at the same time, not easy. To manage all of this seamlessly, you need software.
Here are the top 3 ecommerce customer service software what we recommend:
1. DelightChat
DelightChat is a conversation-first ecommerce customer service tool for Shopify store owners. DelightChat was created keeping in mind the problems SMB ecommerce/DTC brand owners face every day. With features like in-app team collaboration, deep Shopify integration & omnichannel inbox besides rocking an aesthetically pleasing design, you can’t go wrong with DelightChat.
2. Gorgias
Gorgias is also an ecommerce-focused customer service software but focused on the mid-market/enterprise segment, i.e. you have a much higher order volume as compared to an SMB. Gorgias has all the features you need to easily manage your brand’s customer service. It’s essentially a ticketing software where each customer support query translates to a ticket that needs to be resolved.
3. Helpscout
Helpscout is one of those cool SaaS tools you see on the market. Helpscout caters to any and every industry, be it automotive, SaaS or ecommerce. Their tool is easy-to-use with awesome features like knowledge-base and automation that help you manage your customer service efficiently.
At the end of the day, you need to be laser-focused in how you manage and optimize your customer service as it’s directly related to critical business metrics like revenue, CX, retention & CLTV.
