Keeping Your Online Customers as Happy as Possible
nb: this is a collaborative post
Providing good quality customer service has always been essential when it comes to keeping customers happy and maximising sales within a business. You may have heard the saying that the customer is always right, and while many customers will regularly say things that are unreasonable or completely wrong, the phrase still stands true.
Why?
Well, when it comes down to it, the phrase simply serves as a reminder that you and your staff always need to do your utmost to meet a customer’s needs and keep them happy. Otherwise, you won’t make any sales.
The customer is the person who has the potential to keep your business up and running or to remove profits and see you experience failure. But how do you keep customers happy when your store operates entirely online?
Or how do you keep the customers that don’t visit your brick and mortar store and shop in your Ecommerce store instead happy? Here are a few ideas to help you get started in the right direction!
Offer as Many Contact Options as Possible
Offer as many different ways for your customers to get in touch with you as possible. Being able to answer their questions is essential to making a sale and being able to process complaints or returns quickly will give them a better perception of your brand and can prevent you from losing them. Some options you should consider include:
- A contact page on your website
- A business email address
- A business phone number
- Business social media profiles with messaging options turned on
Offer Around the Clock Assistance
Seeing as Ecommerce stores don’t have set opening and closing times in the same way that tangible stores do, people’s shopping habits are becoming more varied. Some people will shop in the middle of the night nowadays.
So, you need to make sure that you don’t lose out on sales because your customer service team aren’t available during those hours in order to answer questions and queries about the products and services you provide. Staffing customer service teams throughout the day and night can be excessively expensive. So, it’s a good idea to offer around the clock assistance with the help of a chatbot. This is a piece of artificial intelligence that can provide customers with answers to your most frequently asked questions. This page has more information if this is something you’re interested in!
Train Staff Regularly
You need to make sure that all of your staff are fully trained so that they can deal with customer interactions properly and in a polite manner. Areas to focus on include answering FAQs, tone of voice, proper greetings, how to placate angry customers and more. Many businesses make the mistake of training staff once and then leaving them to it. Train regularly to maintain high standards and keep information fresh in their minds.
These simple steps really can make all the difference to your business’ online customer service. So, make sure to implement them into your business process!