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One of the major benefits of eCommerce is that the business is operating and orders are coming in 24/7/365. Your business never truly closes and you can literally be making money while you sleep. While an eCom biz may sometimes feel like it can run on autopilot because of this, the truth of the matter is that there’s a lot that needs to be done to maintain your reputation while those orders are pouring in.
Customer service is an essential piece of the eCommerce puzzle and definitely not something to be overlooked or taken lightly. Not only do 98% of consumers feel that reviews are an essential resource when making purchase decisions [source], creating an outstanding customer service process will keep your customers coming back. According to Shopify, the average customer acquisition cost for a small ecommerce business with less than four employees is around $58.64. So, keeping your customers happy and coming back to your store will also save you a ton of money in the long run while improving profitability.
I own DermWarehouse, an eCommerce business that sells skin care and beauty products. I also co-founded The Media Captain and consult with a lot of eCommerce clients on the agency side. What differentiates The Media Captain versus other agencies is that we developed an eCommerce brand in-house that’s scaled beyond $5 Million in annual revenue. We practice what we preach and incorporate this into our eCommerce strategy.
DermWarehouse is rated as one of the highest beauty sites on TrustPilot, with 4.9/5 stars and over 5,000 reviews. Over 30% of our customers are repeat customers. These numbers did not happen by chance. They were developed over years of relationship building, strategy, training, and technology. The customer service experience on our site has always been instrumental in growing our business. This article will discuss why customer service is so important and go through the steps you can take to improve your eCommerce customer service experience.
Why is a Great Customer Service Strategy So Important?
We all would obviously rather have people saying great things about our business vs. terrible things, but customer service isn’t only important for your ego. The eCommerce customer service experience simply cannot be overlooked, as having a great strategy in place will increase your customer retention rate, your eCommerce conversion rate, and even your average order value.
Customer Acquisition is Expensive
Too many businesses overspend on their advertising and customer acquisition and underspend on their eCommerce customer service process.
You’re spending a lot of money to get new customers in the door. After the COVID-19 pandemic, there’s more competition in eCommerce, making it harder and more costly to acquire new customers. Guess how much you spend when a customer comes back to make a repeat purchase with you? $0. I know you can do the math here, but spending nothing on your repeat buyers is better than spending a lot on your new buyers. Once you spend the money to get someone in the door, you want to do whatever you can to keep them around so that their second, third, and forth purchases cost you nothing! So, as your business grows and more customers keep coming back, your business will become more profitable.
Increase Conversion Rate & Average Order Value
Having a great customer service strategy in place builds trust among new customers. When a customer has a great experience with your company and leaves a 5-star review on your site, your new customers read these reviews and they trust that they’ll be taken care of when they shop with you. Once that trust is established, not only will your conversion rate increase, your average order value will likely increase as well. When DermWarehouse first started using TrustPilot we saw a huge increase in our conversion rate and a huge spike in our average order value. People were not only more likely to shop with us, they were more likely to place larger orders because they trusted they’d have a great experience with us like so many had before. Reevoo found that 50 or more reviews per product can mean a 4.6% increase in conversion rates. According to a study from iPerceptions, 63% of customers are more likely to make a purchase from a site that has user reviews [source].
Building up our reviews on TrustPilot has greatly increased our average order value and our conversion rate.
Think Big Picture When It Comes to Your eCommerce Customer Service Strategy
One of the biggest issues I see when it comes to customer service is that businesses don’t think enough about the big picture. We’re fortunate in that we sell a product that customers are coming back to re-purchase every three months, on average. Regardless of repeat purchase rate, a repeat customer is always a good customer.
So many companies put so much emphasis on making as much money as possible on the initial purchase that they lose sight of what’s really important – keeping customers around. We are willing to break even on an initial purchase or even lose money if it means keeping the customer happy and increasing the chances that they’ll come back to us. 41% of the eCommerce revenue is generated by 8% of your repeat customers [source]. If we can make a great impression on that first purchase, even if that means going above and beyond and sacrificing some of our profitability, we know the customer will remember it and the likelihood of them coming back to shop with us again will increase.
We think about the big picture with every single transaction. Rather than focusing on how profitable we can be on that one order, we think of the potential average lifetime value of the customer. If a customer orders a product from us and hates it, for example, we don’t want to force them to keep that product, even if it means we’ll have to eat the cost of it. We want to make sure they end up with something they love because this increases the chances that they’ll come back to buy it again. This is the mentality you should have when it comes to customer service.
Negative Customer Experiences are an Opportunity in eCommerce
When shopping online, there are a million things that can go wrong. While you always do your best to ensure all products are in stock, shipping is on time, packaging is perfect, and the mail gets to its final destination safely and punctually, the reality is that things happen. Mail gets lost or delayed, items get damaged, or customers just change their mind or don’t like what they purchased. We’ve had some extremely angry customers at times for one reason or another but we always try to see these situations as opportunities. We do every single thing that we can to help the customer and make the situation right. Many times, we can turn the angriest of customers into the happiest ones just by going the extra mile and showing that we care. Customers remember this, and oftentimes, the ones who started off angry are the ones who end up being the most loyal because they’ve seen how you handle yourself when things go wrong. For example, if someone isn’t happy with a product, there’s a likelihood we’ll allow them to return it or exchange it for another product. Again, we’re thinking big picture as acquiring lifetime customers is always our main goal.
Training Is Key When it Comes to eCommerce Customer Service
When it comes to your eCommerce customer service strategy, training is extremely important. You want to make sure that your staff are handling customers consistently and in a way that makes the most sense for the business. Whenever someone new starts with us, the first thing we do is discuss our customer service motto and expectations to give them an overall understanding of where we stand. You also want to make sure that they know what to do in any possible situation that could arise.
We don’t outsource our customer service. We make sure our customer service reps are either full-time or part-time employees of DermWarehouse, extremely familiar with our brands and products. I can’t tell you how many solicitations I’ve received for outsourcing our customer service. This is the last thing I would consider doing based on the emphasis we put into having the best customer service.
Delegating and Training
As the business owner, you likely know your customers best. For several years, I handled all of the customer service for DermWarehouse myself. While I’m certainly not recommending you handle your customers without any help, it is important that you’re aware of any issues that could arise and document how to handle them. Before I made my first customer service hire, I created a very long document containing every customer issue I could think of. I then wrote detailed instructions for how I would handle each of them. I wrote down even what seemed like the most obvious answers so that nothing would be left to question. I felt much better handing over the reins to an employee once I knew that they had this documentation in place anytime they had a question.
Whenever a new employee starts, they begin by reading through this document so they can get a good handle on our process. Before they ever talk to a customer on the phone, they go through mock phone calls with other staff members, take a customer service quiz that I created to test their understanding of our process, and they always start with customer service emails rather than phone calls so we can check to make sure they have a good handle on how to respond. It takes about 2-3 months before most of our employees are really comfortable on the phones and can handle customers on their own. We continue to expand our customer service training document as we now have more people jotting down notes, questions and key information.
Note: If you are looking for help improving your eCommerce customer service, we can help! Contact The Media Captain today!
eCommerce Customer Service Software
When we hired our first customer service rep, we were handling all customer inquiries through email. This made it extremely difficult for our team to keep track of everything going on. It also made it impossible to share responsibilities. Not only that, if someone left the company, we’d lose our records of any communication they had with customers. After about a year of trying to manage this, we realized that there must be a better way to do this.
After some research, we decided that a customer service software was necessary and we started using FreshDesk, a customer service ticketing software. It has been life changing and I couldn’t recommend it enough. Now all of our customer service inquiries come into one platform. Any time one of our agents logs in, they have access to all the tickets and they can see a full history of any issues. You can auto assign certain tickets to certain agents or use a round robin strategy. FreshDesk is also great for training because trainees can tag managers in any responses so they can monitor how they’re doing and give feedback.
One of the best things about FreshDesk for us has been the ability to create canned responses. Earlier, I mentioned that I put together a training document containing every possible customer service scenario with instructions about how to handle each one. With the canned responses in FreshDesk, I was able to create actual responses to any question a customer could potentially ask. We now have a library with almost 100 of these. If a customer emails to ask us why an order is delayed, for example, my staff can insert a canned response that was written by me. Even though I’m no longer handling any of the customer service for my business, more often than not, our customers are getting responses that came directly from me and were written in my own words. Anytime a new scenario arises, my staff lets me know and we work on a new canned response to add to the list.
We’ve loved using this software so much for customers, that now we also use it for all of our vendor communication as well. It helps keep us so organized and on top of everything. At about $200/month for 4 agents, it’s worth every single penny.
In Summary
We do everything we can at DermWarehouse to keep our customers happy. We always try to go the extra mile and treat our customers like the VIPs that they are. Having a great customer service strategy in place will increase your profitability, your average order value, and your conversion rate. Not only that, getting great reviews will boost your employees’ morale! We even send out a weekly email to our staff highlighting great reviews for the week. The bottom line is that your customers are the people who keep your business running so it’s extremely important to take great care of them.
