The Importance of Stellar Customer Service for E-Commerce Businesses

It’s no secret customer service is important in any industry, but as the e-commerce space continues to grow, it’s even more important in this space to offer a stellar customer experience.

In 2020, e-commerce revenue (partly as a result of COVID-19) brought in a staggering $175 billion, and the Statista Digital Market Outlook estimates that by 2025, revenue will increase to $563.4 billion dollars.

When switching to a competitor is as easy as a click, retailers have to go above and beyond with customer service to set themselves apart.

If you’re an e-commerce retailer, here is what you can gain by providing excellent customer service and five ways to improve your customer experience processes for an increase in sales and satisfaction rates.

What Excellent Customer Service Can Do for Your E-Commerce Business

An excellent customer service experience feeds into your marketing strategy. When your customer is happy, you build trust and lifelong loyalty. Here are ways that a great customer experience can benefit your e-commerce business.

Build Brand Advocacy

Helpful customer service naturally builds brand loyalists.

The more customers trust your brand and the more sure they are you will resolve their issues, the more likely they are to continue using your product or service.

Customers want to feel valued, and valued customers build brand ambassadors.

Building brand advocates and customer loyalty will help increase revenue. On average, retaining customers is five times cheaper than acquiring new ones, so pleasing your current customers is crucial for business growth and success.

Brand advocates are often motivated to leave good reviews online and spread their happiness via word-of-mouth. The majority of online users will trust online reviews just as much as they would from a real-life friend, and 93% of consumers say that online reviews influenced their purchase decisions.

Helps Guide Prospects Through the Buyer’s Journey

Attentive customer service reps and brands readily available will help guide potential customers through the buyer’s journey to their purchase.

Suppose a potential customer has questions about your product, shipping or returns, but doesn’t have someone to ask. In that case, they will likely go to another company to purchase instead of waiting 24–48 hours for an answer from your support staff. Being available when prospects need you is crucial to profitability. 

If you’re unable to provide customer service help 24/7, try providing blog posts, resources and FAQs that are easily accessible on your website. Providing helpful information about your processes or commonly asked questions can help prospects naturally move through the sales funnel.

Displaying commonly requested information will increase the likelihood that prospects purchase from you instead of turning to a contact form.

Increase Sales

A great product is not the only thing you need to increase sales; customer service plays a vital role as well. 86% of customers will pay up to 25% more when they have a good experience with customer service.

Business growth is a collective effort of many factors, including marketing, advertising, customer service, and an easily accessible website.

How To Provide Great Customer Service for Your E-Commerce Business

An okay customer service experience won’t cut it anymore; you must provide an excellent, helpful, and friendly service.

Offer Easy Returns

One of the biggest hurdles potential customers face when contemplating an online purchase is the return policy — or lack thereof.

If a shopper is unfamiliar with your brand or the quality of your product, it’s unlikely they’ll purchase from you if your return policies are strict, confusing, or non-existent.

Instead, make it easy and enticing: offer free shipping. 

Approximately 15–30% of customers return products. While this isn’t ideal, offering the policy will make prospects more comfortable buying from you.

Why do you think people love Amazon so much? One of the reasons is their quick, helpful customer service with an almost no-questions-asked return policy. Amazon makes returning a product simple — almost enjoyably so.

Make Their Shopping and Support Experiences Personal

To stand out from your competitors and provide an excellent customer experience, make your communication with your customers personal. While greeting your customers and prospects by their name helps add a degree of personalization, it is not the only way to do so.

Try offering a rewards program for loyal customers, upsell products your customer would be interested in and remind users of products they previously engaged with.

Winc is an excellent example of personalized customer service. Winc is an online wine delivery service and over time, their recommendations change for each user based on their previous wine purchases and ratings. 

When you order from Winc, you have an option to rate the wines you received, and it connects to your Winc profile. When their algorithm gets a better sense of what wines you like and dislike, they will make suggestions based on your preferences. It’s a great way to bring customers back for more. It shows you value their business and are interested in providing products they truly want.

If the customer starts talking to you about where they live, ask about it. It’s okay to add a personal touch and go “off-script” to add a personal touch and build a connection.

Gather Customer Feedback

Gathering customer feedback is one of the best ways to improve your customer service experience.

Collecting feedback straight from the customer’s mouth is the best way to see where your customer service is excelling or falling short.

If you find out many customers have issues with your loyalty program, you can brainstorm ways to fix it. If you discover your customer service chat help is getting endless poor ratings, it allows you to resolve the issues and make a better experience for your customers.

Provide Around-the-clock Help

Customers don’t want to feel like they have to go out of their way to get ahold of you.

Offering 24/7 help on multiple platforms (phone, email, chat, etc.) is the best way to make yourself available to your customers and prospects when they need you.

For many businesses — especially smaller ones — providing continuous customer service is not feasible. To help staff your stations, consider A Better Answer - hiring an answering service.

A professional answering service can answer customer inquiries and concerns past 5 p.m., on weekends and on holidays — all times when your in-house team may not be available.

Leveraging Customer Service To Improve Your Business

Offering exemplary customer service can be difficult for smaller businesses but should be a top concern for any company.

Providing grade-A customer service will help build brand loyalty, increase sales and boost your reputation.

If you don’t have the bandwidth to provide the customer service you want, an answering service can help. If you choose to go this route, there is A Better Answer and here are some things to look for in an answering service company to ensure you pick one that complements your business.

2023 Buyers Guide

Get Listed

Computer Telephony Integration

 

1.)

Premium Listing Call Center Studio Call Center Studio Call Center Studio is the world’s first call center built on Google and is one of the most secure and stable systems with some of the industry’s best reporting. It is one of the most full-featured enterprise grade systems (with the most calling features, one of the best call distribution, outbound dialing features and integrations—including IVR, AI Speech Recognition, blended inbound/outbound calling and includes Google’s new Dialogflow and Speech API. Call Center Studio is the absolute easiest to use (with a 10 minute setup), and is the price performance leader with lower equipment cost and less setup time.

2.)

AMC Technology DaVinci DaVinci provides Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) to a library of pre-built applications + UXiPaaS (User Experience Integration Platform as a Service) built specifically for contact centers. As contact center needs evolve, organizations need to have access to extend or create new functionality, without waiting to be a part of a software roadmap. Get the benefits of CTI within your CRM like screen pop, click-to-dial, screen transfer, speed dial and more, but future-proof your contact center so you can expand and integrate how and when you want.

3.)

ComSys S.A. CLink for CRM and Call Center Integration CLink by Comsys is a middleware that connects in real-time the CRM and the contact center applications. CLink enhances the CRM with interaction management capabilities from the contact center that allow agents to work more productively across all communication channels. Comsys is a provider of οmnichannel customer engagement solutions that assist companies around the world in delivering unique customer experiences. For the last 15 years, Comsys designs and implements complex projects for clients from the outsourcing, financial services, telecommunications, and retail sectors. Comsys enjoys strategic partnerships with technology vendors like Cisco®, Aspect Software®, and Microsoft® for the delivery of innovative interaction management and contact center optimization solutions.

4.)

Consilium Software Consilium UniAgent™ Today’s call centers need their agents to work more naturally, and respond better and faster. Here, we talk about the innovations Consilium has made with the latest desktop and mobile agent releases of the UniAgent™ CRM connector. From small enterprises to Fortune 500 companies and governments across 110 countries, UniAgent™ comes into action right at the moment of reckoning, making every contact center experience engaging and personalized, powered by simplified customer identification and anticipating customer needs. UniAgent™ provides CRM integrations between all the Cisco contact center solutions (UCCX, PCCE, UCCE and HCS-CC) and over 20 CRMs, such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365... (read more)Today’s call centers need their agents to work more naturally, and respond better and faster. Here, we talk about the innovations Consilium has made with the latest desktop and mobile agent releases of the UniAgent™ CRM connector. From small enterprises to Fortune 500 companies and governments across 110 countries, UniAgent™ comes into action right at the moment of reckoning, making every contact center experience engaging and personalized, powered by simplified customer identification and anticipating customer needs. UniAgent™ provides CRM integrations between all the Cisco contact center solutions (UCCX, PCCE, UCCE and HCS-CC) and over 20 CRMs, such as Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Oracle Service Cloud & Siebel, BMC Remedy, Sugar CRM, ServiceNow, SAP C4C, FreshDesk, and more. Consilium UniAgent™ CRM connectors are proven in over 110 countries with thousands of agents globally. Enterprises are proactively working towards enhancing their Customer Experience (CX) strategy to optimize omnichannel interaction throughout the customer lifecycle. Consilium UniAgent™ is delivering this as a Connected Digital Experience, being at the center of the agent and customer interaction. The 8.0 release of UniAgent™ is designed to help organizations deliver intuitive, contextual and experience-driven customer service across voice and digital channels (chat, SMS and social media.) As we enter the next stage of the global pandemic, contact centers are faced with the prospect of permanently allowing at least some of their agents to be Work-from-Home agents, without reducing the customer experience (CX.) UniAgent™ Mobile (UA™ Mobile) provides a mobile phone-based solution for Work-from-Home (WFH) agents, and can also be used from tablets or PC’s, all without the need for installing anything or requiring VPN. UniAgent™ is now available in a cloud-hosted deployment model. Our choices of subscription-based or owned-license pricing gives the flexibility customers and partners need. UniAgent™ can reduce call handling time, accelerate resolutions, and allow for faster call processing to reduce customer wait times in queue. Contact centers can shorten the total time agents spend on inbound and outbound calls, increasing agent productivity by up to 25% by providing customer information to an agent's desktop at the same time the customer call arrives. This cost saving alone can provide a rapid return on investment (ROI). In addition, quick resolution of customer concerns is possible because agents can now use the historical information in CRM’s to shorten call hold times and quickly address the problem. Finally, simple on-screen click-to-talk capabilities are integrated into the CRM screen, allowing agents to initiate outbound calls quickly. Features and Benefits • Automatic logging: Administrators and managers get Cisco CUIC reporting of all agent activity, and voice and non-voice contact activity is also saved to the CRM. • Omnichannel federation: Support for voice, chat, email, and Universal Queue/UQ routing with Single-Sign-On supported • One-click dialing: Agents need only to click on a phone number once in the CRM to place calls, saving time and removing the possibility of dialing wrong numbers. • Pre-packaged integration: Allows pre-packaged integration between CRM’s and the Cisco Unified Contact Center solutions for fast, easy installation, and easy upgrades when Cisco Unified Contact Center and CRM product versions change. • Full telephony functions: All telephony functions in the CRM agent desktop including phone control, caller identification, and screen pops • Proven architecture: A robust, proven architecture that has been successfully deployed for governments and Fortune 500 companies since 2008.

5.)

IntraNext Systems IntraNext Systems develops agent efficiency tools and data security software solutions for medium-to-large contact centers. Our Event Intelligence® Platform solutions include SmartCTI™, iGuard®, and SmartSIP™. SmartSIP is based on our patented SIP layer technology and provides a DTMF masking solution for VoIP environments.

6.)

Megacall CRM integration CRM We know how important it is for a business to obtain data from its customers and to manage them effectively, so we help small to large companies by integrating their CRM with the Virtual Switchboard. This type of integration will simplify the work of your team and improve the management performance of the contact list and its information.

7.)	NovelVox NovelVox CTI Connector NextGen Cisco Finesse, Genesys & Avaya Embedded CTI Connectors for Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, ServiceNow, Zendesk & more.

8.)

PhoneIQ PhoneIQ What is PhoneIQ? PhoneIQ is the modern cloud phone system and contact center platform built exclusively for companies on Salesforce. Our all-in-one cloud communications platform brings together power dialing, local presence, voicemail drop, Salesforce call routing, call recording and a complete PBX replacement that lives within your CRM. With support for desktop, mobile, and desk phones, PhoneIQ works seamlessly at the office or remote, logging all interactions in Salesforce and generating reports in real-time. Best For Companies using Salesforce and looking for a phone system, dialer, or contact center software that provides deep integration capabilities with their CRM and expert Salesforce support.

9.)

PRILINK Easy Contact Center Traffic Analytics (Ec2Traffic) Prilink Ec2Traffic provides network traffic analytics (NTA) for Internet, SIP Trunk and WebRTC traffic for on-premises and cloud Contact Centers. Ec2Traffic analyzes network layer 2 to 4, RTP and SRTP packet loss and SIP protocols in real-time from the demarcation point or network edge, generating NTA metadata and requires little telemetry bandwidth. Ec2Traffic provides: - Year-round NTA metadata - Daily CSV files upload to Customer business applications - Capture packet to Wireshark for Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) - detect traffic anomalies - and more ....

10.)

Teckinfo Solutions Pvt. Ltd. InterDialog UCCS InterDialog UCCS - a robust contact/ call center software that helps organizations provide a seamless customer experience across all channels in the customer service journey. All interactions from various channels come to a single unified queue on the InterDialog platform. With unified view agents get to see all historical interactions , enabling him to give a resolution quickly. InterDialog UCCS is a comprehensive Contact/Call Center Software with robust CTI, Unified Q ( ACD), Reporting, Unified Agent Management, Administrator, Supervisor - Monitoring (Pmonitor)

11.)

The Primas Group Primas CX Primas CX is a CTI-based contact center enhancement suite that takes your contact center software to the next level. It provides a set of tools that every contact center needs, over and above their vendor features. *Advanced Call Back in Queue & SMS in Queue *Agent Screen Pop *Chatbot Automation *Welcome Back Greeting *Post Contact Survey *Dropped Call Reconnect *Digital Front Door & Many more As a Vendor Agnostic ISV, we pride ourselves on delivering the best COTS & Custom solutions for any contact center in any industry.

 

View more from A Better Answer

Recent Blog Posts:

5 Thoughts You Need To Stop Ignoring When It Comes to Customer Service	August 19, 2021
How To Provide 24/7 Customer Service Without Working Around the Clock	July 22, 2021
How AI Is Changing the Customer Service Space	June 28, 2021
Virtual Assistant vs. Answering Service: Which Is Right for You?	June 22, 2021
6 Most Common Call Center Myths Debunked	June 21, 2021
Live Chat vs. Phone Support: Choosing the Right One for Your Business	June 21, 2021
Tips To Help Improve Your Company’s First Call Resolution	May 30, 2021
The Importance of Stellar Customer Service for E-Commerce Businesses	May 25, 2021
Growing a Business: Automated Messages vs. Hiring an Answering Service	May 21, 2021
5 Benefits of Using an Answering Service for Educational Facilities	May 20, 2021