After finally catching you first customers, you will need business support.
Finding clients is difficult but keep and maintain them requires a lot of energy.
If you have a successful e-commerce platform, the incoming support volume will expand and your team could enlarge along with it. At this point you will need a deliberate strategy and a more powerful tool set, to ensure to maintain high standards of service and low replying times.
Channels to use in your support strategy
- Help content
- Phone support
- Live chat
- Social media
1. Email: provide fast and asynchronous support
People are already comfortable with sending emails to get help and a lot of purchasers expect that online stores have an email address or a contact form on their website.
The email is also asynchronous and relatively easy to manage compared to live support channels in which someone from the team has to be present and solve issues in real time. The ability to set reasonable response expectations is another benefit.
Spend time in analyzing your customers’ requests, arrange potential responses and try to reuse them automatically. The first customer may wait 5 hours for a response, but the second one could get it automatically.
The services that can be activated in support of the email sending can be various, ranging from Mailchimp, to Zendesk, Gorgia, xSellco etc.
2. Help content: offer responses to your customers
When your customers contact you is because something went wrong or because they cannot find the information they were looking for. Providing your customers with the proper information and simplifying their search help them become “better” customers, way before they reach your support email inbox.
A right and up-to-date FAQ page is the main tool of business consulting.
3. Phone support: offer a direct line to your business
For some companies, providing phone support is great. Many customers still prefer calling for urgent and time-sensitive issues. If you sell high-priced products, your customers will probably contact you by phone if something goes wrong.
4. Live Chat: solve customers’ issues in real time
Live chat is a fantastic way to provide your potential and present customers with a fast and easily accessible support. If you consider starting a live chat, think about where you wish your clients access the chat and what you hope to get with it.
Besides who can access the live chat, think about when it has to be available. It does not have to be available 24/7. You can set the hours of chat opening times and post them on your website so that your customers know when they can find you there. Alternatively, you can offer a live chat depending on your traffic peak hours, such as during a promotion or right after sending an email to your list.
5. Social media: support your customers in public
Social support differs from other channels in a fundamental way: it can be viewed by anyone who wants to see it. Every interaction with a customer on a social media is an opportunity to show to people who you are and that can create or destroy a potential relationship with any person who finds the conversation.
You probably cannot cover all social media platforms, so a good way to restrict your options is to support your current or potential customers where you already have a marketing presence. To decide, ensure you had considered on what channels you want to spend your time, but also which ones your customers like the most.
Business supporting tools for social networks are Facebook Messenger, Sprout Social, Hootsuite and many more.
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