Augment your e-customer support with customer self-service

Amazon leads the eCommerce business. It has managed to sustain its position consistently for the past many years. Have you wondered why? Can you implement Amazon’s mantra for success?

With eCommerce businesses booming and everyone eyeing a slice of the pie, getting ahead of competition is a necessity. The threat of a competitor edging past you is ever prevalent. So how do you survive? By offering pre and post sales service!

Is it really that simple? The ideology is simple. You serve your customers better and they show their loyalty by becoming your organic influencer marketeers. Loyal customers keep coming back, talk about your products and services to friends and family, influence people to opt for your services and leave good reviews on the social media websites. You gain an increase in web traffic, better conversions, increase in sales and enhancement of the order value. Consequently, your sales volume and revenue generation increases.

Why Customer Self-service?

With so much at stake, can you afford to take customer support lightly? No! Amazon goes the extra mile by taking advantage of known channels like Live Chat Agents, Chatbots, social media websites, loyalty schemes, discounts etc. Additionally, it also maintains a prominently placed customer self-service dashboard.

Effectively, Amazon induces customers to look up their order details, seek answers to queries and get their issues resolved all by themselves. In extreme cases where the customer is unable to resolve an issue, he or she gets directed to the Live Chat agent or the Chatbot.

You can replicate this in your eCommerce website too. It does not cost too much money. Rather, by implementing customer self-service you can lower your operational costs without diluting any aspect of the customer support policy you currently follow.

As your eCommerce business grows, you will need to augment your customer service. That means more staff to hire right! Not necessarily!

Because by implementing customer self-service you can offer an alternate channel of customer support. The fact that customers do not have to wait for Live agents to be free to take their call makes customer self-service lucrative to eCommerce customers.

What defines a good customer support system?

A good system of customer support can be distinguished from others based on:

•       The ease with which support channels can be accessed
•       The TAT it takes to offer a resolution to a query or problem
•       The experience it provides for its customers

While scaling your customer support system, you should take care that the above fundamentals do not get diluted in any way. Hence when you design and get a customer self-service portal integrated within your eCommerce website, ensure that your customers can:

•       See their entire order history, past and present, in one place
•       Track an order and seek resolutions for all order-related issues using an interactive process
•       Explore product FAQs
•       View their individual conversations with your chat agents

Design your customer self-service portal to be such that it becomes a customer’s first go to point for any queries or order-related issues. Only complex cases should get escalated to your customer support agents. This will enable faster TAT and take away some pressure from your customer service agents.

4 lucrative advantages of implementing customer self service – ticket management

Let us talk about specifics here. A recent survey indicates that 89% of customers visit a website with the intent of switching to competitor websites if they have a poor customer experience. That is a huge number. Can you even think of losing such a high volume of business?

Today, spending money on offering superlative customer support is an investment, one that you do with the intention of expecting high ROI in terms of sales and revenue. Other advantages of customer self-service that lead up to a high ROI include:

• Reduction in support tickets by 35%: Surveys show that almost 35% of the support tickets raised pertain to issues with customer orders. Most of them are repetitive and relate to order cancellations, return requests, refund policies, delivery address change requests etc. For a Live Chat agent, it means answering the same questions again and again for different customers. These clog up their bandwidth and ultimately the customers suffer as they are subjected to queues and long wait times.

Implementing a customer self-service portal will direct these queries towards it. Customers can resolve their queries by themselves. This saves time. Further a personalized dashboard also makes the customer feel valued.

• Help build custom workflows for product recommendation: Customer engagement is vital for an eCommerce business. You should constantly keep in touch with your customer. Now the customer self-service portal can also be used to enable customer engagement. By keeping a track of the customer’s product preferences and product searches, you can build customized offers for customers and easily communicate the same to them. Introducing a traditional FAQ section in the portal can deal with commonly asked questions about a product. This will further augment customer engagement and lead to better sales.
• Offer 24 by 7 support with additional staffing: The internet has converted the whole world into one big marketplace. But if you want to cater to a global audience, you need to provide 24×7 customer support. The different time zones required make it a necessity. Additionally, there are many people who prefer to browse through eCommerce websites at night. Having a customer support that operates round the clock can offer support to all these customers.

But to offer 24×7 support, you need to increase your support staff. Not anymore!

You can offer 24 by 7 customer support by keeping your customer service agent strength the same. How? Simply design a customer self-service portal that is exhaustive yet comprehensive. Now you can offer support round the clock every day of the year without any additional investment.

•  Good means of data collection: When customers avail of the self-service option, they leave behind a trail of data. This data, when analyzed, reveals heaps of information about a customer. This information can be further used to come up with better customer engagement strategies.

Customer service agents also have access to this data. Hence when a customer calls with a problem that they were unable to resolve using the self-service portal, the agents are already aware of the problem and ready with the solution. This will further help you to augment customer experience.

eCommerce self-support comes with a lots of benefits. Many customers prefer self-service because it is quicker and more effective. Today there is no question of a debate. If you want to serve your customers better, you need a self-service portal displayed prominently on your website.