Guest Post for Reamaze by: Tony Messer @ Pickaweb
Tony Messer is the co-founder and CEO of UK web hosting company Pickaweb. He is also an author and loves helping small businesses, web designers and developers to achieve great things.
If you run an Ecommerce store then you don’t need me to tell you that it’s tough out there.
Faced with an increasingly bewildering array of stores, brands and options, consumers have little incentive to stick with products or brands that don’t meet their needs.
That’s why Customer Service is more important than ever. In fact, with today’s smart, sophisticated, and savvy consumers, it’s something you can’t afford to ignore if you want to not only attract new customers, but keep the ones you have happy.
But that’s not just my personal opinion – the facts bear this out:
“66% of customers switch companies due to poor service.” (Accenture)
“55% of consumers have intended to make a purchase, but backed out because of poor customer service.” (AmericanExpress)
“50% use a company more frequently after a positive customer experience.” (NewVoice)
Convinced how important customer satisfaction is yet?
Having amazing customer service can dramatically impact the bottom line, turn customers into loyal fans, and set your store apart with a serious competitive advantage.
Now, if you want to learn eight ways to improve your customer satisfaction that won’t drain your time, energy, or bank balance, keep reading.
1. Live Chat
Consumers crave someone to talk to when they run into a problem, it’s something that even the most incredible automated computers just can’t replace or solve. In fact, 57% of customers prefer live chat assistance, according to eConsultancy.
Once you implement a live chat system, you can see the results (and return on investment) almost immediately. Not only can a live chat help you connect with customer and build brand loyalty, but your customer service team members can have incredible insight into the mind of the customer by simply chatting with them.
2. Use a Help Desk and KnowledgeBase
One of the biggest causes of frustration for any customer is trying to find a way to resolve a problem on their own and running into a roadblock at every turn, especially when their issue is something quite minor.
That’s where having a Help Desk and KnowledgeBase can be a huge customer benefit. In a Harvard Business School case study, Cisco found that when they focused on providing their consumers with a number of help channels, including a help desk, knowledge center, and support community, the number of customers who were handled through self service went from 30% to 84%.
3. Improve Transactional Emails
Do you know which type of email has the highest open rate of any that a business can send? Yup, it’s the humble transactional email. Those emails that include information like invoices and shipping confirmations. In fact, they have far higher open and click through rates of any type of email sent, (as seen in the chart above by Experian).
And yet so many brands are ignoring the potential of transactional emails. Don’t make that mistake. When you send out your transactional emails optimize them, include cross-sell and up-sell products, highlight other items to buy that are personalized to their purchase behavior, and as a minimum include social media links at the bottom of the email.
4. Make Customer Service Social
One of the biggest moves that eCommerce brands have been making is towards providing customer service via social media channels. It’s become so popular that Twitter has reported a 2.5x increase of customer service conversations on their platform.
Make your brand available via a social media channel like Twitter. Even if you don’t have a dedicated Twitter help handle, do a quick search of your brand and see what your customers are saying, if you notice they have a complaint, jump in and offer to help. If they are gushing about how much they love you, be sure to thank them for their loyalty.
5. Increase Site Load Speed
Most eCommerce sites are loaded with images and product descriptions, all things that can really slow down a website if you aren’t paying attention. Now, if you think your website load speed doesn’t matter, think again.
How’s this for a sobering fact: “If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year.” The good news, is learning how to speed up your website is a pretty easy fix if you focus on the main issues first. Load speed is something that can have dramatically positive results, both for your customers and your bottom line.
6. Play with Video
If you’ve been paying any attention to the marketing landscape at all in the last year or so, there’s no doubt you’ve seen the explosion of video on websites and social media channels. A study by Adobe found that shoppers who view a video on a site are almost 2 times as likely to buy than non-viewers.
Thankfully, anyone can jump into the video game, to start all you need is a smart phone, giving it a very low barrier to entry. Use video to optimize how to use products, showcase testimonials or reviews from happy customers, or highlight a product unboxing. Videos don’t have to be long or over the top, even 30 to 60 seconds will do.
7. Review Chat Transcripts
The chat transcript of your help team can provide you with all sorts of golden nuggets that you generally wouldn’t be able to access otherwise. Here, you can see your customer’s biggest sources of frustration, learn what products they would love to see more (or less of), and understand what features of your site might be requiring too much effort on their end.
Assign a person (ideally not one on your help desk chat team) to collect the chat transcripts and read through them on a consistent basis. Identify areas where your customer service team can be more helpful, or show more empathy, and see what complaints pop up again and again from customers. Once you find and fix those, your customers will notice.
8. Check Your Onboarding Process
What the most successful and highest rated eCommerce brands understand is that once a consumer becomes a customer, the service should not stop. If anything, brands need to be paying more attention to customers once they have purchased. A huge part of that is the on-boarding process. Remember, your customer’s very first interaction with you is going to set the tone for your entire relationship, so you’d better make it a good one.
Treat your current customers with respect, create an automated email campaign to check in on them after purchase, and touch base frequently. When they request help, follow up immediately, within hours, not days. Above all, understand what success means for your customers (remember to check those help desk chat transcripts) and work backwards from there to create a process that gets them there.
Conclusion
As you can see, taking even the smallest of steps towards improving your customer satisfaction levels can have massively positive results. Remember, it’s far easier to keep a customer happy than it is to convert a brand new customer, yet so many brands aren’t paying enough attention to the customers they already have.
Set your brand apart by focusing in on providing outstanding customer service and you’re going to set yourself apart. You’ll find that this will increase your customer satisfaction, which in turn will improve your sales, repeat customers, and customer referrals.