Whether you’re a big business owner or a small scale ecommerce self-starter, customers are your reason to live. If they are not, you should actually rethink your business priorities, now. In a customer-centric era where everything is about building the most user-friendly website, designing the best possible customer shopping experience, making sure your customers are 100% happy with your services, it can be quite hard to stay on top of your game and fulfill customers expectations. This is where customer care and support for ecommerce becomes vital to your brand.
However, it can be even harder to make sure you reply to every single customer request, question, or issue in the shortest time possible and these days, that is what your customers will expect from you.
Quality customer care and support is literally what can make a brand stand out and gain loyal followers who will praise the offered products/services. It’s all about making yourself available at all times to whatever the customer may need and most of all, solving whatever issue he or she may have to their satisfaction.
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Source: Receiptful, 2015[/caption]
So how do you make sure to reply to all customer questions and requests in a timely manner? What if you start getting too many emails and calls, more than you can handle? How to deal with a dissatisfied customer that has made his issue with your brand public on social media?
We come at your rescue with the following guide to the best customer care and support for ecommerce businesses!
The easy-to-use channels for your customers to reach out to you
Let’s start with the basics: your contact info
Having clear and concise contact information that is very easy to find on a website may sound like a statement that is obvious but actually, it is not. There are so many of you out there misplacing contact info and making it hard for the customer to find it. Even if your contact page is only 2 clicks away from the homepage, that is simply one click too much. Your contact information should be prominently featured on your homepage or at least the link to your contact information should be there.
While we understand that many of you may be using contact forms to avoid getting spammed all over the place, bear in mind that these are not liked very much by customers. Contact forms may appear as if you are trying to hide information rather than as a channel of communications.
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Include email address in your contact page[/caption]
We do think that having a nice email address (and possible a phone number connected to an answering machine) published on your website is the best way to go to make your customer feel like there are people working behind a brand and there is a way to contact these people. You can always deal with spammers by enabling spam filter options and adjusting your email settings in general.
The infamous FAQ page
Let’s face it. FAQ pages are so often hated by users. Why? Because customers are often encouraged to visit the FAQ page to find the answers to their questions. In most cases, they either don't find the answer to their particular question or the information provided is not enough.
Having a FAQ page is a great way to reduce the number of questions and requests that you may get via email but unless the FAQ page is truly informative and comprehensive of all the frequent questions your customers have, you will get negative points for having it on your website.
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Let customers find all answers in one single place[/caption]
To make sure your FAQ is truly valuable to your customers, each time you get a question via email or your social media, note it down and see if it’s featured on the FAQ page. Update your FAQ page regularly by adding the answers to all questions you’ve been receiving but are not included in your FAQ.
Provide answers to anticipated question in advance by linking the right way
A great way to make sure the customer finds answers instantly is by featuring links to your “more information” on your most visited pages.
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Internal linking logic[/caption]
For example, always make sure links to your shipping and return policy, loyalty programs, any benefits a customer may have when shopping with you are prominently displayed on product pages. After all, a very good shipping and exchange policy may just help the customer make the decision to buy a product from your brand.
Social media at your service
If you currently use your social media only to promote your latest products and services you are losing so much business potential. Social media is such an easy-to-use tool and channel to reach out to large audiences of potential customers and most of all, to get feedback from your current customers. You can literally talk do dozens of your customers at the same time and make sure they are happy with your services.
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Source: LinkedIn, 2016[/caption]
If there is a particular customer that reaches out to you and expresses his or her dissatisfaction with your services, reply to them right away and show your willingness to do everything you can to help them with the issue they are having with your brand. Other people on your social media will appreciate you listening and paying attention to what a customer has to say. Most of all, everyone will appreciate that you will go out of your way to try and make each of your customers happy with your services!
When needing help to manage your customer care and support
There are some excellent customer support softwares that provide you with the tools to always stay ahead of the customer care game. These applications usually offer help desk services such as point of contact and ticketing, and CRM options to support lead extraction and account management. These type of software is a great way to simplify the management of customer issues as well as organisation issues you may be having in a very fast and efficient way.
While a small ecommerce website owner will be able to manage its customer support and management on his own, mid scale to larger businesses may find it difficult to stay efficient in the customer care department.
This is why we rounded up the best rated customer care and support softwares currently available on the market!
This is a help desk software aimed at both small and large scale businesses with many benefits that simply outperform most of other very well known help desk tools. It’s also the best software if there is more than one person working on your customer care. The benefits include:
☛ a panel with constant status updates and with agent-collision detection function (it prevents having more than one agent sending the same response to a customer)
☛ labelling tickets in a customised way so that it adapts to the way you do business
☛ automation tools to make replying and managing accounts more efficient
☛ discovering customer comments about your products and services on social media
☛ based on customer queries, it builds a knowledge base to be able to suggest answers in the future
☛ it has a time tracking option so you can analyse where time is lost
☛ it helps you support customers from different zones and languages
☛ it features a customer satisfaction survey so you know if you’re doing it right
☛ it features multi-channel features and game mechanics that keeps the score of each agent’s performance and how good they are at using the software (whoa!)
☛ it has an app both for android and iOS
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Freshdesk dashboard[/caption]
Fresh desk has a free trial plan so you can try it out before investing your budget!
This is an IT service desk software deployed via cloud, which means there is no installation required and is super fast. Its main goal is to provide thorough reporting and alerts to your IT people. Basically, your website visitors can submit requests and the software automatically provides IT with access to related asset configuration.
With Samange, IT can see anything that goes on from business service requests to delivery processes.
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Samange: Incidents lists[/caption]
14-day trial available!
You may already have heard of Zendesk as it’s among the most popular help desk software apps. Zendesk is the number one cloud-hosted customer desk software used by both small businesses and big players like Zappos. Its benefits include:
☛ super easy deployment
☛ all channels of communications are pulled-together in Zendesk (emails, chat, social media..)
☛ it features a knowledge base/FAQ search self-service portal which means customers can get some of their answers 24/7 if this options is enabled
Eeasy integration with ecommerce, CRM, social media, analytics and popular apps such as Salesforce, Wordpress, Google applications (and other).
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Zendesk open ticket solving[/caption]
30-day trial available!
Another cloud-based platform that is super easy to install, efficient, and allows users to provide smooth customer support from any device and around the clock.
It has many of the benefits of Zendesk and Samange but simplified. Fresh desk is great for those wanting to have an efficient help desk service but simplified.
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Freshservice dashboard[/caption]
You can test it out easily as it’s free to use but limited to 3 agents and 100 end users. if you like it, you can upgrade for a reasonable monthly fee.
If you have a question for us or want to know more about customer care and support for ecommerce, shoot us an email and our team of customer care & IT experts will be happy to help you out!