The today's generation is tech savvy. When everyone is going online from booking a taxi, buying stuff online to ordering medicines from a website. The customer today is well aware about his reach. The shopper nowadays knows very well where should they voice their opinions and share feedback. Since the buyers first look for an online solution, feedback and credibility of the product, thus it’s very important to make sure the customer leaves with a smile not grudges. A complaint tweet, a poor rating, a bad FB post by an unhappy customer will affects your sale in certain way. People will not buy it if someone is bad mouthing about it. Be it positive or negative - one tweet, status update, or blog post can reach hundreds of thousands of people in an extremely short amount of time if it's picked up by the right outlets. Thus providing exceptional customer service is an essential part of every e-commerce business. Customer service can be used for various important things like raising awareness of the brand, for a good marketing strategy and of course customer retention. Here I'm giving you 5 reasons on why customer service is an integral part of your e-commerce set-up.
Reason #1
One happy customer gets you two more- If in case you had an issue with a product and when you wrote it an email l to the support team. The customer help desk reverted asap with an apology and got the product replaced asap. Thus even a bad sale eventually turned the table around and you got what you wanted thus you would refer to your friends telling them that all the issues are been taken care of nicely on that site.
For example see this one :
Also Read : How to maximize the retail profit using price monitoring software
Reason #2
The user reviews works wonders for the new coming customers- With an easy access to the web, think of a situation when you are planning to buy a new headphone and the model that the site is selling and is already in your cart item but you are not making the payment as you are unsure. You got to the reviews section and a similar buyer had given 5 stars to the same product. You will make the payment without a second thought, but wait read this controversy post first where Flipkart was deleting negative review from their websites, so you would need to be careful on this and should also read reviews on other sites as well.
Reason #3
People get immediate support which helps in closure- There are people who like to ask questions, in fact many questions to help them understand what happens next, will this product work for them, what if something went wrong, etc. To put it in a nutshell they want someone to help them at every step. Now fulfilling this is very tricky as this might increase the sale closure time. A live chat or an email could be the best possible solution. Someone having a problem can immediate have a customer support member help them on the issue. Hence the closure.
Some good tool for live chat and customer engagement on your website :
Reason #4
Client feedback helps you grow- It’s the user who would show you the real truth. That would happen if you have a good customer support and an efficient feedback system. A happy customer will tell you if there is a scope for improvement and an unhappy client will kill you with scope of improvements. Either ways you need to take the comments in a healthy way and start working for the betterment of your business. It may be possible that the user exp of your site isn’t good or the product takes a lot of time to load and possibly you would have skipped these errors. But a follow up mail, call after the sale might help you collect these feedbacks.
Also Read : 10 Reason of shopping cart abandonment
Reason #5
Accessibility / trust factor- Online shops lose customers who do not trust their online payment processes. Being opened 24/7 means that many customers might require assistance out of the standard office hours. This is a great challenge for any eCommerce store, to provide support to customers at night or over the weekends. Customers might require assistance. Online, this will fall on your customer service. Easy access to live chat, phone and email are crucial when it comes to offering assistance to customers. Online stores have to work hard at establishing customers trust in order to convince them that it is safe to buy from them. This challenge falls mainly on customer service. Having someone to talk to or contact is crucial for customers when building trust.
Remember in the online world, if customers are not satisfied with a store’s offering or customer service, they can easily move to another website with a click of a mouse. It will not take them a second to close the tab and leave the site. Thus you need to go into intricacies and take care of every possible option that could hamper your sale. Providing a good customer service is an integral part of any business. From a small, corner shop to a massive, multi-million ecommerce site. Seemingly, from just one customer a month to hundreds of sales a day, you will always have someone inquiring about what you sell and how.
Do let me know your thoughts and what was your experience with customer services in fastest growing e-commerce business