7 ways customer services and ecommerce should work together

24 Nov 2017 Dominic Comments Off on 7 ways customer services and ecommerce should work together

I recently wrote a piece summarising the benefits of focusing on customer retention vs customer acquisition. The latter can be expensive and does not guarantee bringing in customers who will place repeat business with you.

The customers who DO place repeat business with you are your bread and butter – it is this base you need to focus on and listen to who can help you subsequently shape your offer over time – ensuring they stay with you as loyal, repeat customers and enable you to build your business more effectively.

When I work with any business – either short term or long term, the first port of call for me is sitting down with the customer service team. These are the staff at the frontline of the business who can give you a good “heads up” of all the current issues your customers are facing.

Your Ecommerce team and Customer Service team should be working in unison and working very closely to resolve customer service issues and help refine your product offering. It is also essential that this work is not done in confinement but is shared with the wider parts of the business.

For me, working closely with customer services means focusing on a process of continual improvement and using those insights to shape key changes in the business in the following ways:

Customer Reviews

If you have no customer reviews set up, how do you know what your customers may think of your products? Retail businesses need some form of customer reviews set up in order that both you and your customers can see what issues are coming up. One example I can think of was a client a few years ago who had no reviews. After implementing, we quickly established a problem with one range of products and addressed with the supplier.

Customer Feedback

Its surprising the number of times I work with a company where the one area which is under in vested in is Customer Services. This is the one area which can really help you improve your business and so need investment. You need to have efficient reporting in order to identify every type of issue being raised and categorize them appropriately. This feedback needs to be discussed weekly at your management meetings in order that you can identify the key issues and frustrations they are experiencing.

Outbound Calls

Most customer service teams will also focus on outbound calling to customers. If your team does not have this I would consider it as in my mind this is invaluable. A client of mine was recruiting around 200 customers a week however was losing 400 customers a week. Clearly trhis was an issue as, without either more customer acquisition or focus on customer retention, it would have a serious issue with sales in the near future. I sat down with the team and set up a basic customer retention program based on:

• Running lists of all non orderers in last 6 months who were about to lapse
• Email to all in this list with strong reactivation offer
• Outbound calls of all non respondents from this list

Customer Surveys

Surveys are essential for any business and can help to shape anything from product feedback to frustrations with your website – the list is endless. My preference is with Survey Monkey and this has helped me shape many of my clients strategy over the years – from indicating gaps in product ranges to highlighting major frustrations in online checkouts and other problem areas of the business. These can be quite time consuming to manage however I guarantee they are worth the effort as the insights your customers will give you are like gold dust.

Measure Feedback

You deserve a good pat on the back if you’ve established all the customer service improvements stated above. However, there will always be areas for improvement and what better way to find them than by measuring customer satisfaction?

There are plenty of ways to do this. One way is to send out customer satisfaction surveys after every completed order or inquiry. Your customers, regardless of how good or bad their shopping experience was, will appreciate this.

Social Media

You don’t really need to have to stare at your feed all day in order to get feedback from your customers. There are plenty of tools that can be used to alert you when your customers are talking about you such as Social Mention to fully paid products such as Mention

These tools can help you stay on top of when and where your product gets mentioned so that you can respond to your customers. They’re great for marketing, but just as important for customer support.

To take things a step further, you could look at using Twitter and Facebook integrations in Groove to get social media mentions right in our help desk, where we can create support tickets from social mentions and respond directly from the app.

Customer Satisfaction

ou deserve a good pat on the back if you’ve established all the customer service improvements stated above. However, there will always be areas for improvement and what better way to find them than by measuring customer satisfaction?

There are plenty of ways to do this. One way is to send out customer satisfaction surveys after every completed order or inquiry. Your customers, regardless of how good or bad their shopping experience was, will appreciate this.

Customer service will set your eCommerce business apart from the others. You have to be prepared to invest finances, time, and effort to provide your customers with a unique shopping experience. Remember that your business is as much about your products or services as it is about your custome

I hope the above highlights the importance of working closely with your customer service team and gives you an insight into some of the things which have helped me over the years with some of my clients.

Categories: All Posts, Customer Surveys, Planning, Trading Tips