How to Achieve Customer Service Excellence in Your Shopify Store
Selling great products isn’t enough to guarantee customer loyalty. Your products could be fantastic, but if your service isn’t, your customers might not return.
Webs.org provides free advice on marketing, Internet ads, classified ads, domain names, web hosting and website design. It is brought to you by URLs.net.
A Salesforce survey showed that 88% of customers said that good customer service would make them buy again, so achieving customer service excellence should be a key part of your brand loyalty strategy if it’s not already.
We’re no longer in the “Have a nice day.” era of customer service. As eCommerce becomes more competitive, businesses are always looking for ways to stand out and offer a great experience for their customers. This means listening to feedback, solving problems, and being empathetic toward customer needs.
Let’s dive into the world of eCommerce and explore what you can do to achieve customer service excellence.
The Importance of Customer Service Excellence for Shopify Stores
Perhaps you already offer a good standard of customer service. Maybe your team is polite and skilled in addressing customer problems, and you think you’re doing enough. But have you taken a deep dive into the benefits of going above and beyond for your customers?
Providing excellent customer service can:
- Increase customer retention
- Help increase your positive reviews and referrals
- Strengthen your brand
- Increase revenue
- Help you stand out in a sea of competition
What Is Excellence in Customer Service?
When you’re striving for the top, you have to offer something more. In customer service, this could include:
- Consistency in offering a high-quality service.
- Understanding and empathizing with the customer.
- Addressing issues and rectifying problems quickly.
- Regular service level reviews to look at areas to improve.
- Taking on board customer feedback.
Tips for Achieving Customer Service Excellence in Your Shopify Store
Now you know the importance of mastering customer service excellence in your Shopify store, how do you achieve it? Follow these top tips to elevate your customers’ experience:
1. Make it Easy for Customers to Get in Touch
Nothing is more frustrating for a customer than having to search through pages of “help topics” to figure out how to get in touch with a company. Excellent customer service on Shopify means having clear communication channels.
Source: hubspot.com
A “contact us” page is a great place to start; you can include a contact form, your email, your phone number, and even live chat.
Your contact page should be easy to find, and all of your links and details should be accurate and in full working order.
It’s also important to offer a range of touchpoints to make communication easy for your customers. This means thinking beyond your website by offering support via your social media channels, as well as video tutorials to address common issues or virtual agents to address concerns quickly.
By making access to support easy, you’re telling your customers that you value their time and care about meeting their needs. A 2022 survey by Statista shows that most people prefer telephone support to resolve issues; digital channels are also preferred by a large segment of customers.
Source: statista.com
2. Make Sure Your Customer Service Team Knows How to Communicate Well
Anyone talking to customers should be trained to empathize with them and address their concerns with sensitivity. Active listening is an important skill that your team should be well trained in. Using positive language and personalization to improve the customer’s experience and help to build rapport and trust is also paramount.
Staff training is crucial in building a team that offers superior customer service. This training can be in-house or external, but it should be undertaken regularly to keep standards high and stay ahead of changes in technology and customer demand.
3. Provide Detailed Product Information
Customer service shouldn’t be a reactive response. Many customer complaints, frustrations, and issues can be alleviated before they even become a problem by simply providing the right information in advance.
There’s nothing more frustrating for a customer than receiving a product that’s different from how it was described on your Shopify store. Perhaps the description didn’t contain enough information, or the image was misleading.
Source: madeincookware.com
Inaccurate, limited, or false information will only cause more returns and poor reviews. Providing as much information about a product in the first instance can reduce these problems and lead to a better customer experience.
To create the best product descriptions, consider including size charts, accurate descriptions of the materials used, aftercare instructions, and anything else that you’d want to know as a customer.
4. Make Your Exchange and Returns Process Simple
Buying online can be a gamble for a customer. Clothing might not fit, the quality of a product may not be what the customer expected, or they may simply not like the item when it arrives. Making the returns process easy can help dial down any worries a customer might have about making a purchase.
Source: tentree.com
To make your returns process simple, you should provide:
- Free return labels (QR codes, emailed labels, or no-print options etc.)
- Easy drop-off points
- A simple online process to request a refund
- A clearly outlined returns process
Including these elements can make all the difference. A customer may simply not like a product, or it may be faulty when it arrives. These things can happen. But if the returns process is simple, it will help you retain that customer.
5. Simplify Your Checkout Process
Checkout optimization is a great way to ensure you achieve customer service excellence. New customers may want to make a purchase without the hassle of signing up.
Image source: lunchskins.com
Having a one-click option and an easy-to-use payment interface with a range of payment options, like PayPal and Apple Pay, can make things easier for customers to make a purchase and reduce the risk of abandoned carts.
6. Use Proactive Communication
Before a customer raises a complaint and leaves a bad review, why not ask them about their purchase? Sending “Are you happy with your purchase?” emails or welcome emails can prompt customers to get in touch if there’s an issue.
Proactive communication is a fairly modern strategy for reaching customer service excellence. It means establishing customer service before a purchase is made, which helps build customer trust and create a positive experience from the start.
This helps contain any dissatisfaction—you can lead the customer through your problem-solving process and reach a resolution before they have the chance to leave a bad review.
Asking customers if they’re happy with their purchase can also help you gather positive feedback and prompt your happy customers to leave reviews.
7. Utilize Contact Center Technology
Using call center technologies can help contact center managers perform their roles more effectively. Call center technology software can include automated systems, customer relationship management, and analytics tools to provide valuable data about your customers.
Some call center technology can even incorporate call-specific tools, such as automated call distribution, interactive voice response, and call recording. These can be used to improve collaboration and training within your team and offer a better overall service to your customers.
8. Conduct Thorough Financial Planning and Analysis
At first glance, you may wonder what financial planning and analysis (FP&A) has to do with offering excellent customer service, but it can give you an in-depth understanding of your business and your market. What is FP&A? Financial planning and analysis is a holistic approach to financial planning and management.
While this includes forecasting, budgeting, and planning, it requires an understanding of marketing insights and future trends to supplement the raw data and how business operations are run. In short, it can help you budget for and plan your next steps in customer service to stay ahead of the competition.
Having a good understanding of your financial health can help you plan improvements to customer service, such as efficiency, which can reduce your overheads (and customer headaches). Customer journey data can help you prioritize investments to improve the customer experience.
9. Gather and Act upon Feedback
If you want to guarantee customer service excellence, who are the best people to ask how you’re doing? That’s right, the customer. Collecting feedback can come from reviews on external sites, through contact center feedback, or by asking via email.
However, when you collect feedback, it’s important to collate it all and analyze it to identify the strengths and weaknesses of your current model.
What are the common themes? Is your sizing too big? Can you go back to the manufacturer? Is shipping too expensive? Can you find a new courier?
Striving for excellence is an ongoing process, and it can sometimes feel like a game of whack-a-mole, whereby you solve one common problem, and another rears its head.
But that’s the nature of eCommerce—it’s ever-changing, and you have to keep up to stay in the game.
10. Have an FAQs Page
Certain questions will crop up a lot. Frequently asked questions can zap your resources quicker than a ninja with a lightsaber. Customers are savvy and will have a good idea of whether their question will be in the FAQ section or if they’ll need to chat with a real person.
An FAQ section provides customers with a quick and simple solution while keeping your customer service channels clear for other issues.
Source: kulalaland.com
Common questions include those about your exchange or returns policy, shipping times, and whether you offer international shipping. Shopify even has built-in web templates that include FAQ page templates.
11. Develop a Service Level Agreement
If you’re really serious about customer service excellence, a service level agreement (SLA) can give your customers faith in your services and help manage expectations.
An SLA is a set of guidelines that both you and the customer agree to follow. This includes the standard of service you’ll provide (such as response times) and the expectations you have of the customer.
As a Shopify store holder, you’re responsible for the level of service you guarantee, so if you say that you’ll respond to queries in 24 hours, you must ensure you do.
12. Offer customer rewards
Customer service isn’t just about resolving or preventing problems. Going above and beyond means showing your customers that you value their custom. Rewarding loyalty is a great way of offering a high standard of service to your customers and a nice way of saying “thank you.”
Customer rewards come in many forms, a percentage off the next purchase, a birthday discount for loyal subscribers, or points-on purchases. Some companies even send out random rewards to “Beat the Monday blues.” or to wish you a “Happy hump day.”
Whatever you choose, it’s important to make your policy clear and manageable.
Final Thoughts
Offering excellent customer service should be part of your Shopify strategy since it has a huge impact on customer satisfaction levels. This helps increase retention, brand loyalty, and word-of-mouth recommendations, and with so much competition online, customers expect a high level of service.
Much of what we’ve covered above are practical strategies that can be implemented easily. The tricky part is monitoring changes in the market, technological advances, and trends that may require you to alter your strategy.
Excellent customer service necessitates consistency, review, and positive change as part of your ongoing strategy. Get that right, and you’ll soon see the benefits.
The post How to Achieve Customer Service Excellence in Your Shopify Store appeared first on .