8 Tips for Excellent Customer Service in E-Commerce

"The most important single thing is to focus obsessively on the customer” – Jeff Bezos. If you have ever bought anything from Amazon, you will know that they offer some of the best, most customer friendly, shopping experiences that can be found anywhere. Their return policies are very lenient which allow you make a purchase much more comfortably. Are there buyers that take advantage of this level of leniency? Of course. Ultimately though, if you are doing it right, the benefits will far outweigh the losses. Whether the customer is “always right” or not, a business will not succeed if customer service is not a top priority. Many would argue that it should be the number one priority. Often, we fail to see our business through the customer’s eyes. How would you like to be treated during a failed transaction? What kind of customer service would you expect? As a reseller on multiple different online platforms, I often see questions being asked about how to respond to a certain customer message on online forums. I am baffled to see many advise to “hit the no response needed button”. It is true that sometimes the problem is not for you to solve, for example if you are dealing with a Fulfilled by Amazon problem and have no control over the shipping delay because Amazon are fulfilling the order. But how will the customer know they have contacted the wrong person? All they will experience is having an issue go unaddressed. This could lead to a customer staying clear of your store in the future, or even affect your ratings by having negative feedback left based on their experience. We, as the business that the customer is buying from, need to take ownership over the entire customer experience. In my pre-reseller life, I dealt with customer service a great deal. Retail customer service in a fast-paced Manhattan environment. I can honestly say that the right customer service can go a long way both on a brick and mortar, as well as online. 1. No customer service is the best customer service. "The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works." – Bezos. Most customers appreciate a self-service experience, particularly when shopping online. They don't want to have to reach out to the seller for information, such as further information about the condition of the item. They want a quick and easy experience from the start. Include as much information as possible in your listings, and make sure they are detailed and customer friendly. Try to use language that is clear and understandable. Think about the questions that a customer may have, and try to include that information up-front. Include information about your return policy, shipping and handling times, and detailed condition descriptions if needed. If you sell in a specific niche, over time you will start to really understand the types of questions people will have about the items, and can start to include more information in your listings. As you get frequent questions, think about how you can reduce future requests by improving your listings - this will help with customer service, and also save you time in the long run. 2. Be Consistent Try to be consistent in your approach to basic requests from one customer to the next. If you do not already, make sure you have systems in place regarding how to answer to basic questions. What is your return policy? How do you deal with escalated order defects? What is your answer when a customer requests a refund due to 'Item arrived late' or similar? Creating systems up front allows you to drive consistency. Not only will this support consistency from customer to customer but will also expedite your process when dealing with issues. 3. Be knowledgeable about the products and services that you offer. The more familiar you are with your products, the best customer service you will be able to offer. If you own a drop shipping business, for example, ensure that you have seen the products you sell firsthand as much as possible. If you receive the item the same way the customer will, you will be able to see if the quality and other characteristics match your description or not. Now if you are selling books on Amazon, it will be impossible for you to act as a librarian and know about every single title in your store. In this case you can still use great customer service by being honest about what you do and do not know. 4. Be friendly and personable when given the chance to interact with your customer one on one. If you have scaled up your business that someone other than you is in charge of Customer Service, ensure they also offer this during hiring and training. Do not allow any personal frustrations reflect on your customer interactions. This may seem like common sense to you, and if it does, great! However, I have seen many online forum threads, some including screenshots, of sellers arguing back and forth with customers. This is not only affecting your store but also your health and your outlook on reselling in general. No one wants to wake up to an angry customer asking where their package is and get into a back and forth argument first thing in the morning. Instead, kindly offer them assistance in any way you can. Can you speed up the postal carrier in any way? Most likely, no. Can you open a ticket that may or may not get far but at least the customer sees you have put some care into it? Absolutely. You taking action will go a long way. This brings me to the next point. 5. Ensure you are the one providing the customer service and not sending your customers on a wild goose chase. Do not ask customers to do their own customer service. In the previous customer service example, some people would be quick to send the customer to the postal carrier to inquire about their package themselves. From the customer’s perspective: you ordered something, you paid for your order, now you have to go chase it down? I would not shop with that store again. Would you? Having said that, it is absolutely ok to give your customer a little homework where applicable. Just think from a customer perspective, how far will you be willing to go before an order becomes a nuisance. 6. Offer fast response times. Enghouse Interactive ran a poll of 1000 customers in which they were asked how long they were willing to wait for customer service from different companies. 77% of the customers said they would not wait longer than 6 hours for an email response. The Shopify website has good articles explaining the data on the importance of quick response times which I highly recommend for anyone curious about the studies behind this topic. Having a quick response time on your online store is essential. The faster we respond to questions regarding our products, the more likely we are to get a sale. The faster we answer to a concern or complaint, the more likely the customer is to want to come back. The longer the wait to get an answer, the more agitated the customer becomes which will make a resolution harder to be achieved. 7. Offer Solutions Offer options. “I can’t do that, but I can do this.” Give options for a solution that can benefit the customer if they have been wronged. All resellers have dealt with refunds outside of our control, particularly with the pandemic going on this year and all postal carriers running with massive delays. Though offering refunds is always an option, it should not be the first. The disclaimer to this is to analyze if further action makes the item not profitable either way. If a customer is asking for a refund on a $7 item (out of which you are only profiting a couple of dollars after selling fees), is it worth your time to go and investigate further, open tickets, inquire assistance from other sellers, etc.? Or is it best to refund, apologize for the inconvenience, and move on to more profit-making areas of your business? We will all agree on the latter. This, however, is not always the case. As the price of the item goes higher, the harder it is to not break bank by simple refunding. I find offering multiple options for solutions can go a long way with your customer as it shows you are honestly interested in assisting them with their concern. Solutions around how the customer will get the product they paid for should come before solutions on appeasing financially. This is, of course, when possible. 8. Truly address the issue to better your business and future customer experiences. It is important that we do more than apologize to a customer from an inconvenience. If it truly was an opportunity on our end, we need to do our best to learn and grown from this experience. I personally read every single return reason to see why my customers were not happy with their purchase. For one order, I had a return reason be because my listing neglected to inform the customer of a small, specific flaw. A flaw so small I never thought of mentioning. The nature of this item (pre-owned) was one that needed to have such flaw mentioned I realized. I kept that in mind for future listings and never had that be a return reason again. There will be things we will oversee as we are simply not perfect. Growing from such feedback is particularly important for any business. Do not automatically be offended or jump to the defensive. “If you can't tolerate critics, don't do anything new or interesting.”- Bezos. Last time I quote Bezos, I promise! He has, however, created such an exemplary customer service-based business that is important to take as many nuggets of knowledge as we can. If you are reading this, it means you are thinking of, or already doing, something new and/or interesting. You also know that tolerating criticism is an important task we resellers need to become familiar with. Yet, we are still human, and it does not come easy to take criticism, particularly when we have worked so hard to build something that we are proud of. A one-star review can have a bigger effect on you, your day, your outlook of your business, than a five-star ever will. Criticism goes deeper than praise. Try to use this as an opportunity to fix issues you may have with your product or process though. It will help in the long run. Also give yourself a break and know that you will not be able to make every single person you deal with happy. Customer Service Should be one of your main focus areas As we continue to scale our business, customer service will be one of the areas closely monitored and managed. As much as we support automation of tasks, we want to make sure the personal touch is never lost. This is something we will always advise. We hope you continue to grow your business, particularly during these trying times. And we hope you do so by revolving your operations and strategies around outstanding customer service. If you found this useful, make sure to check us out on Instagram (@resellingtips) where we share frequent quick tips for resellers. Do you feel that customer service has played an important part in your business? We'd love to hear about it. Drop a comment below!