Customer Service is one of the most crucial things to determine an eCommerce stores success, significantly improving a stores growth and customer retention rates. We are about to explore just a few ways to improve your customer service experience quickly and easily.
1- Understanding your customers
Arguably the most important part of the puzzle. You need to understand who your customers are, what makes them tick. After all, how can you expect to deliver a good experience if you don't know what it is customers want?
This involves conducting in-depth customer research to create customers personas in a way that will help us to deliver personalised experiences. Through this research, you can identify your target audience and there specific needs.
By gathering data on customer demographics, preferences and behaviours, you will be able to tailor your products, services and marketing strategies to better cater to customer expectations.
Creating a personalised experience is a sure way to improve customer experience. Data can be used to enhance product recommendations, targeted promotions and communications.
A customer persona is a great way to achieve this, by developing detailed profiles of your ideal customer it can help better empathise with there needs, preferences and pain points.
2- Optimise your store
We talk about this one all the time but it's because it's important! And nowhere more so than for providing a good customer experience. This can include optimising your site for Mobile devices, keeping the store theme simple but attractive (less is more!) and performing speed optimisations such as image compression. The majority of users nowadays are shopping on there mobile devices so make the navigation simple and allow them to get from landing to checkout in as few clicks as possible, the quicker and smoother this experience, the more likely the user is to go through with and then perform recurring purchases.
3- Checkout process
Optimising the checkout process is another crucial step to improving the customer experience. All good stores give the user multiple options for completing there payment, try and cater for as many different people as possible, for example, Paypal, Credit and Debit cards, Cryptocurrencies and finance. Take as many obstacles away as possible during this process that would cause you to loose the customer, split payments are a great way to allow users to complete a purchase without the big financial commitment upfront.
Streamlining the checkout process is another must, Shopify offers a pretty good checkout process by default, having recently moved to a one page checkout flow for all stores, but you can enhance this experience by offering things like a guest checkout option and provide clear instructions both of which will greatly benefit customers.
4- Customer support tools
There are a plethora of customer support tools and apps built for Shopify, but not all are created equal. It is important that you invest in the right one to make both your and the customers lives easier.
Intercom:
Intercom is one of the best customer support tools available used by many big brands around the globe. Although there plans are considered pricey, they offer a set of tools that perform well and are very easy to use. Tools on offer like there Intercom Shopify app, allow customers to perform a number of self service operations with ease, including checking the status of there order and more.
Order Editing:
Building on the above, this app provides a great number of self service features to customers including giving them, as the name suggests, the ability to edit an order without even needing to contact customer service. Win-win!
5- Loyalty programs
A simple loyalty program can turn a one time customer into a recurring one. They come in various forms from points based systems to tiered systems. A great way foster a long term relationship with your customers and to build the reputation of your brand.
Choosing the right system for your store will depend on the type of business model and products you sell. You also need to make sure that the system is easy to understand and use.
Remember to promote your loyalty program via things like mailing lists, social media and even paid ads, otherwise your customers won't know!
Summary
Wrapping up, we have covered just a few of the best practices we have personally implemented for our clients to improve customer experiences. The beauty of the ones we have picked is they offer a pretty good improvement for your customers with actually pretty minimal effort for you and also have the unintended side effect of making the lives of your CS team easier.
Want to find out how you can improve your stores customer experience? Why not get in touch with us today, let's see how we can help you.