In today’s time, creating an excellent customer base proves impossible without excellent customer service. Hence, top-level communication skills, soft skills, a sharp understanding of customer needs, and problem-solving skills are mandatory for your customer service team. Customer service roles can be exceptionally challenging without these skills.
However, there are some advanced level tricks and techniques, implementing which customer interaction can be great, which will lead to less or no angry or dissatisfied customers.
Remember that brand reputation is everything; each business must ensure their customer possesses key customer service skills.
Let’s cover this topic in depth!
Key Takeaway :
To succeed in Shopify, it’s crucial to possess top-level communication, soft skills, and a sharp understanding of customer needs. Implementing advanced techniques and prioritizing customer privacy will lead to great customer interactions and a strong, loyal customer base. Customer service is essential for business success, demanding hard skills, patience, and the support of technology.
Why is customer service important for a business?
A strong customer support team is necessary for businesses to maintain brand consistency. Moreover, it also becomes a good resource for collecting reviews and feedback.
- Customer retention: More than 50% of customers would block the company after one bad experience with its customer service representative, which marks the vitality of good customer service skills. Another survey by Oracle also concluded that 73% of customers would remain consistent with the company due to a good customer support team. So, by building a good e-commerce customer experience, you can retain your valuable customers. Also, there will be lesser product returns.
- Increased revenue. Research shows that companies with good and strong customer support services earn 60% more revenue than the ones who don’t. This shows that implying good customer service is important for a company’s growth.
- Improved branding. If your company is good with social media customer service, your customers will surely make it viral by sharing the news on different platforms. This will undoubtedly boost your brand’s presence. According to one study, big companies like Disney, Apple, and Amazon have regularly achieved new customers through their amazing customer service.
- Collecting feedback. Customer feedback (no matter the product or service) has always seen a positive impact in terms of company betterment. It provides a way for you to know where your customers are having issues and act accordingly to resolve them. Customer service becomes useful in collecting customer feedback.
Also read: ClickFunnels vs Shopify: Choose the Right E-Commerce Platform
1). Utilizing Messaging Add-Ons for Higher Customer Satisfaction
With the availability of numerous messaging add-ons in the market, it becomes necessary for you to include the most prominent features in your social media messaging app to enhance your customer service.
Quickreply
Of course, you are going to face many repetitive queries from your customer side. Copy-pasting replies would take a lot of time. Instead, you can reply to them by setting a quick reply section, which would reply to the repetitive queries in no time. Desku believes in smartness. That’s why it has a quick reply add-on. A quick reply is undoubtedly a very important customer service skill.
Chatbot
Chatbots will respond to regular queries by quick automation. You can learn how Desku’s chatbots can help you respond efficiently if you plan to implement them as your customer support solutions.
Live Chat
The Live Chat add-on allows you to have real-time conversations with your customers. You can embed this functionality on your e-commerce website, where you can respond immediately to your customer’s questions.
2). Answer the customers quickly to Ensure Strong Customer Service
To be tagged as “great customer service,” your customer support representatives need to be agile. Many businesses might think that if the customer queries are responded to slightly late, it will not impact much. However, a study conducted by Hubspot states that 60% of the customers expect to have responded quickly within 10 minutes. Moreover, it also states that 82% of customers strongly believe that good customer support is the one that produces immediate responses.
That’s the reason why companies are relying more on chatbots nowadays. Chatbots are useful in automating several organizational sales, marketing, and support workflows. This allows the support teams to concentrate on more important customer queries and helps them give the best possible solution to their customers.
Moreover, chatbots also help set auto-reply messages, which is a great help when your customers send queries after office hours. The Auto-reply system would send them an “Away” message indicating the business opening hours. This would give your customers an idea of when their issue will be resolved.
3). Build your strongest community on social media
Today, the number of social media platforms is increasing at a faster pace, and so is the number of their users. That’s why social media platforms have become a good marketing resource for e-commerce businesses to reach a wider audience.
Seeing such a demand, applications like Facebook and Instagram included marketing functionalities like a marketplace and shop tab.
Social e-commerce provides a huge stage for businesses to build a strong rapport through social media platforms. It becomes very useful in increasing customer engagement and brand loyalty through social-media communication by leading word-of-mouth interactions and promoting products by sharing valuable posts.
However, it’s a reality that although social e-commerce is a huge marketing platform, it is being ignored by businesses. So, businesses who need to start building their online presence for social media platforms become very useful.
Also read: Best Shopify Themes for Your Business’ Success
4). Offer continuous support throughout the selling process
Your customers are going to need your continuous support during their buying stage. Smoothly helping them would help you build a long-term relationship with them.
However, providing customer support is not a one-time game. You will have to provide continuous support to them no matter what. This is because, once provided, help makes them believe you will always have their back in every situation.
You can induce a continuous support system with the help of live chat. This will allow your customer support team to have real-time interactions with your customers. Desku’s live chat provides pop-up message functionality that prompts different messages to users during their visit to your e-commerce store.
The best example of this is after a successful payment process; you can prompt payment success messages to your customers.
5). Choose the right tool for both internal and external communication
COVID-19 brought a revolutionary change to the corporate world: WFH employee permissions. Although this grant benefited employees by allowing them to work in the comfort of their homes, it would become tedious for managers to manage the teams, especially the customer support, to have seamless collaboration and internal communication.
This is where applications like Desku have a space of existence. Through its collaboration feature, Desku allows teams to collaborate and solve complex issues collaboratively. Such a collaborative approach increases the overall efficiency of the customer support teams, and working collaboratively can lead to the best solution for the customers.
Besides communicating, you can even share notes internally with your teams to plan the strategies to work more effectively and efficiently. Moreover, it also becomes much easier to manage the teams.
Also read: How to Put Icon Images in Shopify Footer
6). Teamwork is king. Build a knowledge base for customer success.
Customer support leads to tremendous success when approached in a unified way rather than through individual efforts.
That’s why emphasis is laid on including a knowledge base corner in your system. The knowledge base corner would include documents like informative guides, case studies, and blogs.
It would help your customers to solve the common issues on their own. The knowledge base corner not only remains helpful for your customers but also increases your efficiency level as it helps you concentrate on solving more complex customer queries with the best solution.
Besides this, a knowledge base helps you store past conversations based on which any of your team members can get knowledge about the customer history and their issues.
You can even store your phone conversations and social media conversations in your knowledge base. You can find an insightful knowledge base if you’re going with Desku, as italso offers some tremendous insights.
7). Be present on the right instant messaging channels
Customers always like support services with instant replies. This is because those instant replies give quick solutions to their issues. For instant replies, messaging platforms like Facebook, WeChat, WhatsApp, and Line are considered to be perfect messaging channels.
Even a study says that more than 56% of these messaging users in the global market had their questions answered via these instant messaging platforms. Moreover, these instant messaging platforms also serve as a good medium for businesses to promote their products, thus creating brand awareness.
That’s why, recognizing this great need for instant messaging platforms, Desku has also embedded instant messaging platforms that allow you to communicate seamlessly with your customers on different channels.
If you are thinking of improving your customer service, including an instant messaging system in your store can help you.
8). Understanding your customers through means other than analytic tools–review
Of course, a data analytics tool provides you with valuable insights into your customer behaviour. This gives you an idea about where you need to improve. However, you cannot remain dependent on a single application for studying user behaviour.
Google Analytics also becomes a good resource for conducting customer analysis. Besides this, reviews and feedback become gems in understanding your customer requirements. It also gives you ideas about issues your customers are facing using your application.
Even Amazon became such a huge marketplace through its review and feedback system. Now, you might think embedding a review system in your application is a tedious task. However, this is not the case. It becomes very easy through SaaS products like Desku.
9). Provide personalized service to Elevate Customer Service Experience Level
Today, serving only unique products and services is not enough for you to stand out from your competitors. Giving a unique customer experience also matters a lot. For this, conducting personalized conversations with your customers can greatly help you. Such interactions make your customers believe that your business cares for them, thus elevating long-term customer relations.
For example, Desku helpdesk software adds a touch of personalization by sending birthday wishes to customers. It also sends welcome messages to new customers on onboarding. This builds a good rapport of your brand in front of your customers.
10). Streamline query workflow
Task distribution and right assignment are very important for conducting a highly efficient and seamless customer support process.
To imply this, either adopting a ticketing system or a central message management system can help you out. Moreover, it becomes utterly useful for leading smooth social-media communications.
Through Desku’s shared inbox feature, you can collaborate with your teammates and discuss more complex issues. You can even assign queries to your support agents based on their resolution expertise.
11). Enable self-service
One of the best ways to lead seamless customer service is enabling self-service in your application in the form of a knowledge base corner and FAQs. However, it’s a harsh reality that businesses often forget about adding this information.
According to a survey conducted by a US company, more than 60% of customers are attracted to businesses that offer automated self-service in the form of chatbots on their websites and mobile applications.
Even 77% of Microsoft users like their self-service support section. Self-service can be presented in numerous forms. However, Forrestor found out in their study that most of the customers like knowledge bases for self-service presentations.
You can publish informative and helpful guides in your knowledge base portal, which your clients can access. This would allow your customers to get answers instantly and reduce your customer support volume by 20%.
Even Shinesty’s director, Antonio King, believes that the real power of customer support service lies in providing automated self-service to your customers. He has to say, “Being able to associate customer retention directly with customer support has been an eye-opening move for everyone in our organization to the extent of identifying ways, across the org, to continue minimizing the customer’s effort.”
With Desku’s live chat tool, you can automate answers to the most common queries. This would allow your customers to quickly resolve their queries instantly. It will also help your team to engage with more important tasks efficiently.
Also read: How To Create Perfect Shopify Customer Accounts
12). Prioritizing customers’ Privacy to Make the Customer Feel Secure
It’s a fact that customer support services will never require any sensitive information from customers, like bank details. Moreover, asking for such details would raise questions about brand loyalty.
Thus, every company’s customer support team should respect and maintain their customer’s privacy. This would establish a trustworthy relationship, which would help your company in the long term.
You can initiate the step towards trust-building by explaining your GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) policy terms to your customers before beginning the conversation. The live chat feature allows you to do it.
Customer Service Skills You Need: Conclusion
We discussed essential customer service skills and how to use them to make customers the customers happy, and businesses thrive. A customer may easily feel frustrated if not attended to on time or in the appropriate way.
Working in the customer service department demands hard skills, patience, politeness, royalty, and so on. Equally important is the support of technology; otherwise, many customer service agents, even after being qualified, fail to offer adequate support. Hence, don’t step back from one last thing – check out our guides on the best customer support software for 2024 and 14 Best Landing Page builder Apps for Shopify !
