When you go to a brick and mortar store, you can talk to the salespersons live and thus they can help you make informed decisions. Besides that, if you buy a product from such a store, and later you find that something is not right, you will have the chance to talk with the person who is in charge.

Unlike a brick-and-mortar store, an eCommerce business does not allow the customer to talk to the salespersons in person or can not contact the customer care representative face to face.

This is exactly where the importance of customer service for online eCommerce businesses comes to the spot!

In this article, we will discuss how customer support is important for an eCommerce business and how you can give customer service effectively to your online customers.

Importance of Customer Service for a Business

If you are yet to be convinced about, then here are some exciting facts that should change your mind:

83% of online shoppers need assistance to complete an order. (Source: Forbes).
Due to poor customer support, 89% of online shoppers stopped buying things online.
According to Marketing Metrics, the success rate of selling to a new customer is only 5-20% while it is 60-70% to the existing ones.
Attracting a new customer costs 7 times more than the cost of retaining an existing customer.
Assuming that only one of every 10 happy customers leaves a positive five-star review, and knowing that it takes four five-star reviews to make up for each one-star review, you can figure it takes 40 positive customer experiences to make up for a single bad review.
Bad reviews on your products are shared twice as much as the good ones.

Now, you may think at what point the customer support service comes into the spot? You may wonder that you should only provide customer support after you make a sale. But this isn't always the case!

As I said, a customer is very much likely to seek support right after he or she lands on your eCommerce website to make an informed decision. That is 83% of the customers need customer support services to complete the purchase.

So, here are a few scenarios that you might come across:

Your customers want to enquire about your product.
Customers want to buy your product.
Your customers want to cancel their orders.
They are not satisfied with your product.
They want to give feedback on your product.

In either of these cases, never forget to help them if they seek instructions. Always remember that you will have to give prompt customer support if your customers are in need.

But in how many ways can you provide customer service? Well, there are two ways you can give:

On-Page Customer Support
Off-Page Customer Support

On-page Customer Support

The main benefit of the on-page support is your customer does not have to leave your website to contact you with phone calls or emails. This helps you reduce the bounce rate of your website. And it puts less pressure on your customer care agent.

When you are giving on-page customer support, you are basically giving support through your webpage.

Chat Support

Chat support means when they can talk in real-time to the customer support agent from your webpage using texts or even with voice calls.

However, you can also automate this live support for the common questions using chatbot's artificial intelligence or with IVR (Interactive voice response technology that interacts with the human in real-time.

There are many instances of giving on-page live chat support. You can give support using services like help scout, zen desk or specialized CRM software, and much more.

FAQs or Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently asked questions bring about two great benefits. One is it allows you to reduce the pressure of the incoming customer queries and the other is it improves the page rank of the page that includes the FAQs. This will eventually help you to increase the overall website rank and domain authority.

Hybrid Approach

Hybrid Approach is simply when you give prompt customer support using the FAQ question model and use simple conditions and give your customer support.

What it means is that your customers will have to select a few question options. This way the associated customer will get the correct solution to his or her queries.

So basically on-page customer support doesn’t require a customer to move away from the website to get assistance. The most common examples of on-page customer service are frequently asked questions (FAQs) and live chat support mentioned above

Off-Page Customer Support Approach

Unlike on-page customer support, off-page customer support includes giving support through:

Phone calls
Emails
Face to face conversations.

And all of them have their own advantages and disadvantages.

Phone Support

If a customer gets stuck with any problem, then the first thing that he or she usually does is talk to the customer care agent.

Customer support via phone call is a great option

Email Support

Providing support to your customers through email is the most economical and effective way. It is handy in a way it lets you and your customers add screenshots. And email ensures you document everything you are dealing with your customers. As everything is well-documented it works as proof of communication.

Also Read: A Complete Guide to Relationship Marketing

Bonus Tips

When you are to give customer service, you may have to collect and store customer data like their email, name, website info, and a lot more.

Instead of using boring Rolodex, you can use the WordPress ERP CRM which is completely free to use. Besides storing these customer data, you can send emails and integrate with other Customer Support tools like Zendesk, Helpscout, Awesome Support, SalesForce, MailChimp, etc.

However, this CRM tool comes as a module of the WP ERP. That means if you want you will also be able to use the HRM and Accounting module totally free of cost!

Conclusion

As far as customer support is concerned, you can not make it optional. Because we have already mentioned the reasons why you can not neglect the importance of customer support in the perspective.

Whether you are conducting B2B or B2C business, customer support can be the perfect approach to establish brand awareness and customer loyalty.

No matter what eCommerce solution you choose, make sure that the system lets the sellers chat with their customers. For instance, Dokan, a multivendor eCommerce solution, has an integrated module that lets the customers create support tickets and talk to the seller when they are in need.

Finally, never underestimate the importance of answering customer queries, take suggestions from customer feedback and provide prompt customer service.

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Importance of Customer Service in eCommerce Business