A report released by the Microsoft State of Global Service indicates that 61% of customers consider customer service as essential. And, it’s predicted that customer service will take over product and price as the primary brand differentiator in 2021.
Excellent customer service is the key to great customer satisfaction. This can help your eCommerce business to build trust, thus making your customers make repeat purchases. However, negative customer experience leads to poor client satisfaction, which can lead to a damaged reputation, negative online reviews, and loss of sales.
Now, this is one area where eCommerce sites have a challenge. While these sites are very convenient, most customers don’t have a good experience—thanks to poor customer service. Most eCommerce sites have a challenge in providing client satisfaction that one can find in a physical store.
The main reason behind this is the lack of face-to-face interaction. However, client satisfaction for eCommerce sites is as essential as for physical stores. The report further says that 60% of customers have stopped purchasing from certain websites because of poor customer service. Besides, estimates show that it costs businesses 5 times more to gain new customers than retain them. Therefore, it’s essential to keep your existing customers satisfied if you want them to return.
This post shall discuss the ultimate guide for client satisfaction. Let’s delve in!
Improve customer service
Yes, this is the first step towards keeping your customers happy. At times, your customers will need more information about your products or services. Or they will need assistance when making a purchase. Ecommerce businesses should always have a professional customer service team ready to help customers who need assistance.
If you run an eCommerce business, ensure you have a full-time customer service team. The team should be reachable through email, phone, or live chat. Providing personalized services, and showing the willingness to assist your clients will show positive results.
Encourage customer engagement
Today, almost everyone has a social media account that they check every day. Therefore, it’s important to know the social media platforms that each of your customers follows. This can help you to launch a presence on that platform, which should allow you to connect with your audience.
With that, you can use email marketing to offer your old customers discounts when they follow you on your social media account. Also, you can choose to give discounts to anyone who follows you on a particular social media account.
Besides, you can encourage customer engagement through the following ways:
- Giving special offers specifically for your clients
- Holding contests regularly that offer free prizes to contestants
Provide valuable deals
Yes, you might have received those irritating emails from companies after purchasing a product from their website. Avoid being such a company. Rather than sending those “lazy” and irritating promotion messages for months after a customer has made a purchase, provide valuable offers and deals immediately after they purchase something.
Statistics indicate that people have higher chances of converting when they still have fresh memories of you. Furthermore, offering free and good offers is an indication that you are retaining them as a client—and they will definitely return.
Make follow-ups after solving an issue
When an issue occurs, it’s important to make your customers feel like you are on their side—even if it was their fault. Always follow up to ensure the issue at hand has been fully resolved. Besides, it’s essential to ensure your clients are satisfied with how you handle the problem. You can do this via feedback or email survey—at the end of the day, you should aim to let the client know they have your support.
Provide clear information
Unfortunately, you cannot avoid unhappy clients—regardless of the industry or business, you do. However, it’s possible to avoid possible conflict with such customers. You can achieve this by making your orders more detailed as much as possible.
That means you should provide detailed information on critical areas like guarantees, warranties, shipping, and return policies, as well as any other information that might negatively affect the customer’s experience.
Use address validation tools
Address validation or verification plays an important role in eCommerce businesses. When you verify your client addresses, your business gains several advantages, both directly and indirectly. However, the greatest benefit is guaranteed customer satisfaction.
The last thing you’d want is to deliver goods to the wrong address—this can cause unwanted delays and customer frustration. However, you can avoid this with address verification. Customer verifications tools such as Byteplant can save you time and money when making deliveries, and improve customer satisfaction.
Bottom Line
It requires a lot of time and effort to make and retain new customers. That’s one thing you should understand if you are in the eCommerce industry. With that said, always endeavor to attract new clients, but don’t forget your existing customers. By following these simple guidelines, you are guaranteed optimum customer satisfaction, as well as return purchases. At the end of the day, return purchases are the backbone of eCommerce businesses, and you should never ignore them.
