Be it online business or offline; customer satisfaction is the top priority. When money is the driving force for your business, product quality, affordability, & timely delivery is the motivation potion for customers to purchase from you. Do you know U.S. companies lose more than $62 billion annually due to poor customer service?
The reason is “mouth publicity.”
Yes, that sounds old, but it always works. People talk about shopping & show their interest in the products whenever they find it attractive or buyable. If your product and services satisfied the customer, they will likely spread positive words about your business, else negative. A single negative review is enough to make people think twice about the product they are planning to purchase.
When you are selling through your brick and mortar store, you can understand the tone, communication pattern, body language of the customer to understand their reactions. But, that’s not the case when you are selling online. It would be best if you were a bit more peculiar about the implementation of ways to make your visitors a fan of your offerings.
It’s not possible to make each customer happy, but you can try all the possible ideas that can reduce the count of dissatisfied & unhappy customers in your cart. Here, we are listing the top 7 ideas that you can implement to improvise the customer experience at your store.
- No negligence to web site’s performance: When you are selling your products through your online store, that’s the only way to attract & retain the potential customers. If your website has high loading time or corrupt images or transactional issues, your website visitor will instantly move to your competitor’s site. Don’t neglect the low-quality indicator performance metrics for your store; if you already have a site live, optimize it.
- FAQ page: Every new visitor on your website will have static inquiries at your store, like locations you serve, offer COD or not, regarding return & refund policies, and so on. Though they are common queries, they need to be answered straight away. By adding an FAQ page on your website, you will reduce the customer response time & ease purchasing from your store. This will reduce the count of queries & you don’t have to give repetitive answers for query mails.
- Dedicated customer support: The conversion rate of the ecommerce websites is estimated to be 2-3%. During the entire conversion cycle, there can be several stages at which visitors may have queries. If they remained unanswered, they might leave. An individual or a group of few people may not have an answer for all the customer’s concerns & there comes the requirement of a dedicated support team. This streamlined process will automatically reduce the wait time of the customer when offered through call & can reduce their frustration due to communication challenges. Sooner the challenge of the customer will be resolved; higher will be the chances of their conversion.
- Channel-based support: Depending upon the priority of inquiry & modes of selling, you can dedicate the customer end support services. You might be selling on the marketplace and your ecommerce store as well, with a single channel of communication you probably blend the two. For your ease, we recommend you to keep marketplaces & your store inquiries separate and check them regularly.
- Omnichannel support: When people have so many tasks to handle, they often forget to connect or respond. By offering omnichannel support, you can be on your customer’s minds everywhere. Your posts on social media can be a gentle reminder to them about the product they left in the cart. The situation can be, a customer is active on Twitter & raises the concern directly over there. An unresolved issue on any of the channels can create a bad reputation for your business. Omnichannel support will improve the engagement of users on all the social channels and help you maintain your brand reputation.
- Online surveys & Reviews: Stay open to listening to the people. You can think like customers and evaluate pain points, but there can be few practical issues that only a user can understand. To manage things in the right manner, it is crucial to listen to those issues & fix them in the future. When a customer feels like they are heard & answered, the more likely trust your business. You can conduct online surveys from time to time & ask for customer feedback about your products and their overall experience with your brand. If you are selling to other businesses in the B2B market, you can add their testimonials also. It is obvious; their market value will equally influence more customers to land in your store.
- Live chat support: These days, everyone is more inclined towards instant solutions. When there are so many options available, why would anyone like to wait? When a customer is waiting for your response, they may find some better deal on any other store. By enabling live chat support at your ecommerce store, you can cut off the wait time & instantly offer value-adding solutions to your customer. If you are taking custom product orders on your ecommerce store, live chat can make it easier to understand your customer’s requirement about the order placed. The live support software, if enabled with AI, will be able to talk humanly and attend customers for you when you are unavailable. They can at least navigate the customer to fill the contact form & give you information for interested customers whom you can contact later.
- Automate customer support: We know that personal touch to interact with the customers, and they don’t like to communicate with the bot. Still, you can’t sit & manually write a mail to all of your customers. Imagine yourself writing the same monotonous thing for the whole day or at least a few days a week. That’s tedious and time taking. You can tweak the algorithms or take the help of CRM & marketing automation tools to streamline the process & save you a lot of time.
Above everything, never leave your customers unattended. They might have bad experience interacting with your business or inquire about the products you don’t sell, but you must answer to their concern. If a customer feels left out, there are fewer chances to connect with your business again in the future. This implies that you lose the customer for life. Remember, your business is for people & your interaction pattern makes a lot of difference.
Make your customers happy, & keep selling!
