Providing great customer support needs to be a top priority for any business, e-commerce shops included. As a business owner, you have no greater resource than your customers, and 96% of global customers state that customer service is a deciding factor in whether they stick with a company.
Any good business owner knows that it’s always easier to keep an existing customer than it is to bring in a new one, so ensuring customer satisfaction is crucial for your online store. Whether you’re a small business or are expanding, here are a few tips to provide an exceptional customer experience.
Be as clear as possible about all policies on your website.
In any business, there will inevitably be some unsatisfied customers. Sometimes there’s no way to avoid it, but you don’t want confusion to lead to a poor customer experience. Imagine that you’re running a store that lets customers shop carpet online. Naturally, you want to show off all the best features of your area rugs, bedroom rugs, and shag carpets. You’ll point out how durable they are, how easy they are to clean, and even the fact that they’re pet friendly.
While providing as much information about your products as possible is crucial, you can’t afford to forget about including all relevant information about your business policies. The most important thing to detail is your shipping and returns policy. Customers need to know what to expect if their kitchen rugs turn out to be the wrong size or if there’s another issue with the order. You’ll also need to provide clear details about warranties or anything else that could affect the customer experience.
Optimize your site’s search function.
The majority of customers prefer to use the search function on your website to find products, and you need to make sure it works as well as possible. A great way to get started is by using Google Analytics to determine common industry keywords and to check for any misspellings or other errors that may make your products more difficult to search.
Once you know the most common search terms that are leading customers to your website, you can optimize your own search for those same terms. The faster a customer can find what they’re looking for on your site and complete the transaction, the happier they’re likely to be.
Invest in a call center solution.
You may think a call center is only necessary for large businesses that have plenty of office space and infrastructure, but that isn’t the case anymore. Thanks to cloud based call center solutions, a call center can be perfect for businesses of all sizes. The cloud gives you practically unlimited scalability, and it lets you run a virtual call center where you’re free to hire candidates from different time zones to easily offer around-the-clock support. Virtual call centers are staffed by remote workers, so there’s no need for on-premises infrastructure.
The term “call center” is also a bit of a misnomer these days. A modern contact center equipped with the right call center software will allow your customers to contact the right agents for their needs using digital communication channels, such as text, SMS, social media, live chat, a mobile app, and more. Intelligent routing solutions like interactive voice response (IVR) will also help connect phone calls to agents as quickly as possible.
You can take things even further with true omnichannel routing. This lets customers seamlessly switch between communication methods if the need arises (such as switching a text conversation to a hands-free voice call), all while staying in contact with the same agent. This saves everyone’s time and makes for a memorable and personalized customer journey that inspires customer loyalty.
A unified agent desktop can even boost agent productivity by letting them easily keep track of all conversations across all channels. This will allow agents to immediately join a conversation with the full context of the situation.
