How to improve customer service for your online store and increase eCommerce sales & customer satisfaction

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If you run an eCommerce store, then you have to know how important customer service is.  Good customer service can make or break an eCommerce store.  If you excel at customer service, then you can make more sales and limit negative experiences that not only makes you lose potential customers, but also any other potential customers who learn about these negative experiences.

So, even if you are killing it with your online store in terms of sales, there is always room for improvement.  Because, why wouldn’t you want to make more money?  So how do you get better customer service?  So here are some tips we’d like to share with you on how you can improve customer service

1. Clearly Outline Your Policies

So one of the most important things you should remember when trying to improve your customer service is to limit the amount of times you interact with customers.  Now, this may seem weird, because interacting with customers means you might be on the cusp of a sale, right?  While this is true, it is also true that time is money.  And the more time you spend on one customer, the less time you spend on the next customer.  So if you are spending a lot of your day asking the same questions over and over again, that is time you could have been spending answering other questions in a timely fashion.  We all know that as consumers we dislike when you, say, send an email to a company asking questions and they never get back to you.  It’s also a huge pain when you want to chat with a company and you get stuck in a long waiting list.  So the more questions that can be answered by customers without you or an employee actually having to speak to someone, the better.  So make sure all your policies are clearly outlined on your website.  For example, make sure your return policy is clearly stated on your website, because that’s something a lot of people want to know about.  Also, if you notice there are questions you get asked a lot, maybe add a Frequently Asked Question section to your website with all of these questions answered.  Then, anytime you start noticing a new question being asked a lot, add that to the section.  Because once again, that will mean more time you can spent answering more complex questions or helping convince a customer they need your product.

2. Add Chat to Your Website

How many times have you gone on a website to find out more information and used a chat box?  I do it all the time.  Customers often prefer using chat than an e-mail so their questions get answered right away.  MyLiveChat is a great way to add a chat option to your website, and you can even chat with customers from an iPhone/iPad or Android phone, which is great if you’re away from your office, traveling, etc.  You can add a live help button and customize the chat to use your logo.

3. Have an Automated Chatbox

Back before the days of online stores, customers might only expect to reach a store owner during the store’s business hours.  But things are different with online stores. Because to customers, if they can shop at your store at 2:00 AM, why can’t they talk to you at 2:00 AM?  Studies show that customers expect online stores to get back to you immediately. But if you are running your online store yourself and you don’t want to hire a staff to work all hours of the day, what do you do?  Luckily, there are things called automated chat boxes that can help you out. Customers can chat with the chatbox and you’ll be able to program in answers to questions you receive a lot (because, let’s face it, even if you try to state answers on a frequently asked section, some people may not notice it and will ask anyway). So basically, customers will feel they are chatting with you without you ever having  We recommend using ActiveChat for this.  This is a wonderful service that will allow your online store to answer questions all hours of the day without you having to sacrifice sleep.

4. Use Multiple Chat Platforms

If you only chat with customers in one fashion, you could be missing out.  Having conversations over multiple platforms is a great way to interact with a large group of customers because everyone has their favorite way to communicate.  For example, if you say only communicate with you customers via Twitter Instant Messaging, then you could be missing out on customers who don’t use Twitter but instead use Facebook Messenger.  By using every available messaging option, you could open yourself up to communicating with a larger base of customers and in turn making a lot more sales. The only negative here is that it can be incredibly complicated to handle multiple messaging options – but this is where Rocketbots comes in.  Rocketbots is an automated message command center, and they allow you to manage all of your messenger chats in one place. Not only does this save you time, but it will mean that you’re less likely to accidentally neglect one of your messenger options and never give back to a customer, thus losing that sale (and potentially hurting your store’s reputation).

5. Automate Inventory

So while it can be a nuisance to keep answering the question over and over, what is more troubling as an online store owner, obviously, is the negative customer service interaction.  And one thing that can absolutely lead to a negative response from a customer would be if they ordered a product and the order got canceled because the item was out of stock.  Therefore, it would be a great idea to get TradeGrecko, which is a great inventory management software online store owners can use to automate their inventory to help ensure their inventory is up to date so that there are less cancelled orders.

6. Have a Good Customer Dashboard

Another way to limit customer interactions is to have a good dashboard for customer accounts.  What I mean by that is that when a customer logs into their account, ideally, they should be able to see what they have ordered, how much they have spent, when they ordered it, etc.  Without this, you could end up with customers constantly contacting you asking you about this.

7. Personalize Your Emails

I’ve mostly been focused on those first initial interactions you have with customers, but customer service is also about cultivating relationships so that you have repeat customers to your store.  One way to help that is through subsequent emails to customers.  Once a customer is on your email list, you want to keep sending out emails to them every time you have a sale, a new product, etc.  When you send out these emails, you are going to want to personalize it because that makes your customers feel good and special – and makes them loyal to you.  But obviously, you can’t individually send out emails to each and every one of your customers.  So how do you do this?  By using a great email marketing service like Constant Contact.  Constant Contact Email Plus allows you to things like fill in your emails with Dynamic Content.  This is content Constant Contact gets from your customers when they sign up on your website, such as their name, city, state, etc.  It’s a great way for the customer to feel like you really know them – and that is really a great accomplishment for an eCommerce business, since that is the main disadvantage eCommerce stores have to brick and mortar stores.

8. Use Customer Relationship Management Software

And finally, if you really want to up your Customer Service game, perhaps you should go with Customer Relationship Management Software.  Customer Relationship Management Software offers eCommerce store owners wonderful tools that can really help customer service.  A great Customer Relationship Management Software option is Freshsales.  Freshsales allows you to handle all your customer service needs in one place.  Freshsales comes with built-in phone and email which will allow you to make more calls and send targeted emails with just one click.  Freshsales gives you great reporting options that gives you great insight into each prospect.  Freshales will determine the best sales leads based on who is exhibiting sales-ready signals so you’ll know who to target.  You’ll also get email notifications on email opens and link clicks in real time.  And you can easily access all this information from your mobile phone.  So if you really want to take your customer service game to a whole new level and see your sales increase, then try their 21-day free trial (which is a really great free trial since they don’t even require a credit card).