Knowing that Customer Service is Crutial, online businesses need to get their customer service just right. By providing excellent customer experience you will instill trust from your customers and make them advocate for your business. Below are some useful tips from the BusyRack team:
Create a complete database of customer profiles
It starts from knowing your customers first. Creating and maintaining complete customer profiles enable you to measure your customers’ needs and therefore understand their expectations as well as behaviors. The more your company understands your customers, the more effective you’ll be at delivering relevant offers and satisfying them. Companies can construct good databases of customer’s profiles by organizing historical data of existing customers like demographic, past transactions, purchase habits, gender, etc., or conducting regular surveys, implementing service rating system, discussion forum and so on. Other than such primary data, secondary data that can be obtained from media, research papers, reports, etc. should also be fully utilized.
Committed in offering valuable experiences to customers
As mentioned, experience is important to customers. Hence, online businesses, after investing in understanding customer expectations and their behaviors, should target to deliver what they need in the most professional and unique ways. Treat all your customers with respect and kindness, never sound harsh in emails even though you are dealing with an unreasonable customer. It is easier for customers to get angry in an email than at a physical shop, hence, do expect that and prepare to stay really patient and professional.
Provide product details and FAQs on website
Providing accurate and detailed information on product pages can avoid the need for customers to call or email. Beside that, a comprehensive FAQs section is also required. It needs to be comprehensive and searchable as it provides online customers quick answers to their queries and take the workload off your customer service staff.
Create various channels of communication
Online customers require instant attention. By providing them many channels of communication such as livechat, emails, hotline, forums, Facebook, Twitter etc. you can build an impression of being highly approachable and professional.
Send acknowledgement receipt and ensure speedy responses
Always acknowledge receipt of customers’ emails to ensure the customers that their questions are being dealt with. Speedy responses are also critical in satisfying customers therefore, the acknowledgement email should include a timeline within which the customers should expect some reply. It is best not to get a customer wait for more than 3 days for their problems to be solved and their enquiries to be answered.
Guarantee policy and after sales service
Guarantee policy for products and after sales support for services ensure customers about the quality of your products/services and give them more confidence to buy. For online retailers, exchange/return policy is highly recommended. If an item gets damaged upon delivering, the best remedy to retain the customer’s trust is to offer them a new item in exchange immediately. For online service providers, after sales support is already a must and even more critical.
Increase productivity & set quality standard
An online business has customers from all over the globe. That means you have to deal with huge volume of emails, as well as extra customer calls anytime, so ensure that you have a strong team who are available 24/7 and have superior productivity to deal with all these volume. A standard operating procedure for every aspects of your business should be established and communicated clearly with all the support staff so that everyone knows what level of expectation they have to meet and work effectively towards the same standard.