Do you remember the last time that you bought something online? Chances are that you have surely ordered something through an e-commerce website in the past week, or rather today itself. How was your experience as a customer of that online shopping portal? Do you have any good things to say about your purchase?
Your own experience would tell you the value of principles of good customer service. If a company does not put enough effort into providing their customers with a good core principle of customer service, then it does not matter how good the product is or how much money they spend in marketing and advertising.According to a recent survey by statista, the global online e-commerce industry is expected to be worth more than $4 trillion in 2020. This means that the majority of shopping and purchase decisions are gonna be done online. This makes it crucial for companies to have a great set of principles of customer service in place.
If you are looking for an article to explain the principles of customer service then you are in the right place. Here is a list of 5 main principles of excellent customer service that your online shopping site must focus on implementing right now:
- Meet customers on their terms
You cannot have a one-size-fits-all mentality if you are into the online shopping business. One of the most basic principles of customer service is to meet your customers on their terms. This simply means that you must use whatever tools, channels, and communication platforms that your customers are using to stay in touch with them. In order to abide by your principles of customer service excellence your company must conduct regular surveys to find out what channels your customers use to communicate.
Chances are that your customers would be using multiple channels. For example, around 50% of your customers would prefer using twitter to resolve their complaints and other customer service requirements, about 30% might choose to use email, and perhaps 20% might choose to go with a simple phone call to address their queries. Your job is to abide by your principles of quality customer service and go with what your customer is most comfortable with.
2. Use personalisation to stand out from the crowd
Imagine walking into a store that you frequently shop from and the staff recognises you and says “Hey Jack, we got a new style of jeans that will go quite well with the shirt you had bought last week, would you like to sheck it out?” How would that make you feel? It would certainly have a huge impact on you and make them stand out from the rest of the stores in your area.
Personalisation can be implemented in a wide variety of ways. One of the best ways to implement personalisation into your principles of customer service is to create personalised emails campaigns (or any other channel that your customer would prefer). With the help of a good digital marketing strategy you could easily have the above conversion with your customer using digital channels and make an emotional impact on them.
3. Have a quick response time
One of the main reasons why your customers choose to shop online is because of convenience. If either your delivery or support team fails to deliver the product on time or responds slowly to your customers queries, then it kind of beats the purpose of shopping online. The core principles of customer service is all about speed, convenience and efficiency.
When your customers shop online, they expect quick responses and fast delivery times. More than 12% of US citizens complain that their number one frustration with basic principles of customer service is the “lack of speed”.
You know that you’re on the path to principles of excellent customer service when your company is able to serve its customers with a consistent & high-level of quality in a short period of time. The key is to do this across a different set of channels.
4. Forecast your inventory needs
You will never be able to fulfill your customer demands on time if you do not plan and forecast your inventory needs in advance. This must be done especially during festive times such as christmas, new year's, halloween, thanksgiving, etc. Many articles explain the principles of customer service but miss out on this crucial aspect. Negligence towards your inventory needs can create a shortage in your product inventory and cause your customer to shop from elsewhere.
Here is a great formula that you can use to calculate the point when you need to reorder/restock your inventory. The formula is known as Reorder Point Calculation or Safety Stock Calculation. This formula is used by all of the big e-commerce players in order to maintain their principles of customer service excellence. Apart from manually calculating the inventory requirements, you could also choose to automate this task using AI and digital transformation.
5. Measure the results and optimise
What gets measures, gets improved. It is crucial to measure your customer satisfaction levels because it is the only way that you can improve your principles of good customer service. A great way to make sure that you measure your customer satisfaction is to include surveys and polls after each customer support session. This will not only help you improve, but it will also show your customer that you care for their satisfaction. This step is important in gaining the trust and long term affiliation of your customer.
Conclusion
If you are serious about growing your ecommerce business then you simply cannot ignore the principles of quality customer service. To successfully implement an outstanding customer service, there needs to be a tremendous amount of planning, strategy, and improvements each and every step of the way. Because people prefer to shop online for products like fashion only if they get full support service. If you follow the above principles that have been outlined in this article, then your online shopping business is sure to be a success.
