July 16, 2021
If you have been handling a business, you will know by now that good customer service is one of the major factors for the success of the business. Businesses – especially small businesses, relyon eachof their customers for a significant percentage of theirbusiness’s total revenue. This means that if one customer were to leave, the small business could lose a big part of its sales. This is why keeping every customer happy is absolutely necessary.
It is estimated that it costs five times more to attract new customers than to retain the existing ones, so keeping existing customers happy is crucial. Losing the existing customers can be fatal to the business as this will mean they aren’t happy with the brand, and can leave a black mark on the brand’s reputation.
A truly happy customer is one who will be loyal to you and your business for a long time to come, and will continue to prefer your e-commerce store for their purchases in future, and even tell their friends about it.But what makes a customer happy? Good Products? Yes. Good Service? Of course. But the most important is – great customer service!It was found that up to 68% of consumers around the world had stopped doing business with a brand due to poor customer experience.
Building trust is even more necessary when your business is online. According to our survey, about 81% of online shoppers feel concerned when shopping on an e-commerce website with which they are not familiar with. And to ensure that the probability of sales for a brand’s e-commerce store is high, establishing trust through good customer service is essential, besides having a nice e-commerce website with good visuals.
Around 61% of consumershave stated that good customer service is amust-have characteristic for them to prefer an e-commerce store for shopping. In the next 2 years, customer service has been predicted to take over price and product itself as the main brand differentiator for e-commerce stores! Now this is something that cannot be ignored or taken lightly.
An excellent customer experience can help a brand build customer trust and loyalty online – meaning that customers will always be happy with the experience and consider coming back to your store for more purchases. On the other hand, a bad customer experience can cause reputation damage for the brand or company, resulting in loss of sales and negative online reviews.
Ecommerce sites can be easily incorporated with features that can help customers by keeping them updated on their payment status, order status, etc – and help them track their order or cancel or easily.
But there can be times when customers just want quick answers to certain questions, and they are looking for a more personalized approach and expert advice.Consumers in general expect a personalized approach. Almost 33% customers reported to have abandoned their relationship with an e-commerce brand because personalization was lacking. And for this, brands that have e-commerce stores needto be prepared and be able to offer the required guidance through chats, calls or emails – that customers can be directly connected to from the e-commerce website. Having a deeplypersonalized and instantaneous service will set your brand apart from other online business stores that don’t, and customers will definitely see how knowledgeable you are, and that will make them more confident about choosing your brand.
Also, customers alwaysare attracted to services that make them put least effort, so if something seems complicated or replied get delayed when they need a solution quickly, they will likely give up and may lose the motivation to come back.There may be times when,due to too many requests at a time or unavailability of adequate staff members, you or your team is not able to reply immediately. Implementing a live chat tool which is designed to surface instant answers, can help you keep up with the demand during such high-volume stretches. During busy sales seasons, this helps customers find their own answers, and will also improve your sales.
Well-planned and designed e-commerce websites help business owners improve sales by being able to provide customers with the kind of service and trust they seek, in order to be motivated to make purchases with a brand online.