In our previous post, we introduced customer service challenges in ecommerce that might prove tricky to overcome. This post will focus on best practices for achieving customer service success.
Don’t over promise anything
The golden rule is to undersell, under-promise and over-deliver. You should see your customers as additional salespeople for your business. Apart from your website and the marketplaces, there are many independent review portals like Trustpilot and Feefo where buyers can leave feedback and comments. These days review sites are much better at weeding out fake or planted reviews and a buyer will always trust the opinion of a peer over the seller.
How many channels?
Sellers operate in a multi-channel environment, and buyers are used to completing the search and purchase process using a combination of channels, so you need to offer good communications on each channel, covering telephone, email and live web chat. There are many communications that can be standardised, so you should have ’canned’ communications and responses to frequently asked questions which can be automated or else pasted into conversations with your customers. It’s always better to be proactive, so posting answers to frequently asked questions, and constantly adding to that bank of answers, is a good way of stopping buyers from having to contact you in the first place.
The perfect customer service tool
One of the ways of removing the need for your customer service staff to have to use so many systems to do their jobs is to integrate your systems and processes where possible and centralise the function. This can be a huge time-saver for their staff and drives up their productivity considerably. The Volo ecommerce software allow you to manage eBay customer service, for example, from inside system, so that your staff don’t have to leave it. This also means that you can audit and track your communications more easily as they’re all held centrally.
‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get’
Another rule with customers is ‘if you don’t know, ask.’ Customer surveys where you ask for feedback are a great way for you to stay close to customers and evolve your service according to their preferences. This is also a good opportunity for you to provide a link and ask them – if they haven’t done so already – to post a review on one of the independent review sites to enhance your ratings.
Finally, as we’ve seen already, it pays to stay close to what’s happening with your customer service performance. You should use systems like Volo’s reporting and analysis to track the performance of your products and your suppliers across the regions and channels where you sell. If you start to see a trend of disproportionally high returns and refunds, for example, among certain products or certain suppliers, then you can address these early and improve the efficiencies in your business and your resulting profitability.
Click here to find out what some of our customers have to say about using Volo’s software to manage their customer service..
