When my firm developed the brand for an online dress store, we made clear to the leadership at the company that customer service was going to be an essential component of our overall success in launching a new e-commerce store. Too many companies are so caught up in the site’s design and ensuring all the integrations work that they forget there’s a customer service component that can’t be ignored.
Why Is Customer Service Essential To Ecommerce Growth?
Because marketing departments are often siloed from customer service departments, the two are usually not in sync… which is bizarre because your e-commerce visitor could care less what department you work in. How are conversions impacted by customer service?
- Customer Retention – In our store above, over 30% of our customers return to make an additional purchase within a couple of months. If the product, the delivery, or the return management didn’t meet expectations… that wouldn’t happen. Another store we manage has a 2% customer return rate… want to guess what the difference is? Our store above has 2-day free shipping and no-hassle returns (with the return bag included in the package). Even our customers who return products return to make additional purchases!
- Assisted Shopping – While the design of the site has extensive size guides, assistance, and documentation… customers often just click the chat window and ask a question or two before making a purchase. With over $100 per average order, that’s an incredible return on investment for answering a question! Manning your chat and being responsive to questions is great customer service… and drives direct revenue.
- Reputation Management – In the age of social media, word-of-mouth spreads like wildfire. A negative customer service experience will spread like wildfire online while a positive experience seldom gets shared. If you’re unable to serve your customers and exceed their expectations, the damage you’re doing to your brand is exponentially greater… and the marketing and advertising you have to do to make up the difference are costly.
- Knowledge Base – Tracking your customer service requests in a ticketing platform can help you build out a self-service knowledge base where your customers can easily search and find the information they need to common questions about your products. It’s a common behavior of online shoppers that they’ll leave a site if they can’t find the information they need – so providing a rich library of answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs).
Gorgias Customer Service Overview
Gorgias enables you to centralize all of your support tickets in a single platform – including email, social media, live chat, voice, and SMS. The platform incorporates automation, intent and sentiment detection, macros, a self-service hosted knowledge-base, and reporting to measure your return on e-commerce customer service.
How To Measure The Revenue Impact of Customer Service
Gorgias has a great quote on its site that is quite accurate:
Turn your customer support into a profit center.
This is accomplished by:
- Providing visitors personalized assistance and increasing conversion rates via a live customer service chat.
- Respond to customers asking about your products on your ads and posts, increasing your sales and ad effectiveness by the equivalent of a 5% increase in ad-spend.
- Publish a support center with a library of frequently asked questions where your shoppers can easily find the answers they need.
- Track all sales generated by customer service agents over text messages, social media answers, and live chat conversations on your website.
With Gorgias, you can even see the impact of each customer service agent on overall store revenue – providing a means of rewarding great performance on your customer service team.
Gorgias offers seamless integrations with Shopify, Magento, and Bigcommerce. Along with centralized interactions, Gorgias enables you to automate repetitive support tasks (including order and delivery status auto-responses), and a 360-degree view of your customer with support and order history, customer value, reviews, and rewards status.
Their platform also integrates with Thankful AI, Klaviyo, Instagram, Yotpo, Facebook, Recharge, and more…
Disclosure: I am an affiliate of Gorgias and I’m using affiliate links in this content.
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