Having an eCommerce store is, above all, having a store. The fact that the user buys by himself does not mean that online customer service is a minor issue. On the contrary, it is even more important, if possible, since the online customer service process is the only time we have direct contact with the customer.
However, there is a certain tendency among the eCommerce SMEs to not dedicate the necessary attention to this topic, almost always due to lack of time or resources. Do not forget that the lack of person-to-person attention is the great handicap of eCommerce compared to offline commerce, so a excellent customer service It is a good way to minimize it.
Online customer service channels: which ones should I use?
Having a customer service email is not even remotely enough. There are still many eCommerce websites where finding a phone number is almost impossible. When you don’t give your phone number and replace it with a chat, an email or any other form of indirect communication, the client interprets that you don’t want to face him, which is a negative point of entry.
The online customer service telephone number must be in a prominent place, and also you must encourage the customer to use it for any questions that may arise during the purchase process.
In addition to the phone and e-mail (for God’s sake, don’t use the phone to tell a customer “send us an email” if you don’t want it to burst into flames), the other preferred channel for online customer service is the , specifically Twitter and Facebook.
More and more companies are encouraging themselves to use customer service channels through WhatsApp or Skype. It is an intermediate solution between the relative coldness of an email and attention in person or by phone. In the case of WhatsApp, why not use a conversation channel that everyone with a smartphone already uses?
All customer service channels, although they have peculiarities and, above all, different times, share a series of common procedures to offer the best online customer service, which we explain below.
1. First of all, design your strategy well
Respond to the questions:
- Who will serve the customer?
- What training and qualifications do you need?
- What resources (time, tools, access to information…) do I have to allocate to correctly serve the online customer?
- What office hours will I have?
- Who is going to be responsible to the client?
- When should a complaint be passed to the higher level (managers)?
- How far am I willing to go to meet a customer’s demands?
2. Identify the most common reasons for complaints or queries, and have the response actions prepared
Most of the queries or complaints you receive will be on the same topics.
Therefore, the smartest thing is for your customer service team to have response arguments prepared. This speeds up online customer service times (something that you and your customers will value) and generates confidence in the customer who complains, who feels that the person on the other end knows what they are talking about.
3. Managing an incident has a process: Follow it
There are always a few steps to follow in the online customer service process. You need to design a plan with at least the following stages:
- Listen: At this stage, the customer is listened to carefully, he is allowed to speak and he is not interrupted unless we ask him to expand the information.
- Identification of the problem: The person who attends the client must identify before the client what is the problem you think you have.
- Steps to fix it: The client must be informed of what steps we are going to take to identify the problem (if we have not been able to do it before) and what type of solution is going to be given.
- Solution: If we can fix it on the spot, the customer service person should be trained to do it. If for any reason the solution is not going to be immediate, a maximum solution period must be set, which must be as short as possible.
- Gratitude: You always have to thank the customer for claiming. How do you hear it? A complaining customer is a customer who is doing you a favor, because they are taking the trouble to contact you. Think that most of the clients will not do it, but they will simply stop being your client and you will not know the reason. When a customer goes out of their way to tell you what you’re doing wrong, you need to thank them.
- Compliance and closure. The online customer service process does not end until the customer confirms that they are satisfied with the solution or information that we have provided, so You always have to explicitly ask for this confirmation.
4. Learn to manage an angry customer
There is a specific technique for dealing with this type of client. We are not going to describe it in detail here, but basically it is that there is a anger curve (known as the “hostility curve”) that we should know well. It is this: The anger of a complaining client grows abruptly in the first moments of the conversation, in which the client needs to express his frustration. In the upward phase of the hostility curve it is impossible, and even counterproductive, to try to reason. Here they listen, they are allowed to speak, empathy is shown, they are asked to tell us what is happening to them, and the magic words “sorry” are used.
That does not mean that we agree with him, but that we are sorry that he was angry. Only if we do this can we defuse the anger quickly and get to the stage where we can apply the complaint management protocol.
5. Claims data is pure gold. learn to exploit them
Whether the claims are right or wrong, in an online customer service you have to analyze the causes of all of them and prevent them from continuing to occur.
They are valuable data. both to design products and for the design of your website. Is the information located correctly and accessible? Are we giving the client all the information they need? What are we doing wrong or what can we improve?
Listening to customers and not letting complaints fall on deaf ears can give us the answer to all these questions. To conclude this post about online customer service, do not forget that nothing makes you more loyal what a good attention online customer.
If you are able to solve the problems that customers bring to you, you will have customers who will trust you, recommend you and even be ambassadors of your brand. Never forget that most dissatisfied customers do not take the trouble to complain, but instead become customers of another. Every claim is an opportunity.
You have a lot to gain and nothing to lose.
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