One of the main areas where online eCommerce businesses struggle is with customer service. Many issues that customers raise can be sorted easily and quickly enough, although if care is used throughout your business, you may find that there may not have been an issue there to sort out in the first place.
However, there are practices that you can put in place to ensure that customer issues are kept to a bare minimum and therefore improve your customer service throughout your business.
Keep Your Customers Informed and Updated
You should endeavor to keep your customers informed and updated about their orders – for instance, how they are progressing while they are still within your company and when they are collected by the courier and therefore dispatched. It is also handy from the customer’s point of view to have regular updates on the whereabouts of their parcel on its route to them. Although this may be out of your control, selecting a courier that will supply this service certainly isn’t.
Provide Resources to Handle Communication
The key to customer service is to ensure that when a customer calls or emails, that communication is handled in a timely and accurate way. This means, you need staffing and resources to handle it. Virtual customer service is often used to supply staffing with a reasonable budget. Near shore technicians can handle phone responsibilities, email, chat and also other essential service tasks. This will make a very real difference in how your customers perceive your business.
Enhance Your Shipping Responsibilities
Investing in some quality WMS could improve your business and help your employees pick and pack the right products for your orders, as well as help ensure that you keep an eye on your stock levels. Printing correct shipping labels and including a receipt within the order is also a vital service you should provide to your customers.
However, even with the right information on shipping labels, parcels do, from time to time, go missing while in transit, and in fairness, this can be due to events outside of your control, such as orders lost or stolen on route to your customers. However, knowing how to deal with this situation and having a backup plan in place, such as being able to offer a replacement or a refund, could improve your relationship with your customer.
Of course, the best option to take is to ensure that all shipping is insured against it not reaching its desired destination so that neither your business nor your customer lose out on the cost of the product in question. This also ensures your reputation isn’t damaged as a result or results in your profit slipping.
Listen to Customer Feedback
Asking for customer feedback has become a norm in every kind of business. However, it only plays its part if it is analyzed and acted upon. You will find that not all customers tend to leave feedback, although you are more likely to hear about a negative experience that a customer has had rather than a good one.
Indeed, trawling through this information can be hard work, especially when you are going to have to sort out a plan of action to combat any bad feedback so that it isn’t repeated. The good news is that you can, should you wish, outsource this part to a third-party business that will then provide you with the results and the conclusions that have been reached, leaving you to just put new practices into place.