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Guest Post: A Guide to Training Employees to Deliver Outstanding eCommerce Customer Service

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This week we feature an article from Pawel Lawrowski, Head of Growth at Tidio. He shares six tips and strategies to share with your team for improving the eCommerce customer experience.

Poor customer service costs businesses over $75 billion a year in lost profits. It can turn into hundreds of negative reviews and bad word of mouth, which spreads quicker than a wildfire.

How to avoid that if you’re running an eCommerce business? Only by delivering amazing customer service.

Investing in the team’s skills is a great way to start. By coaching to handle every situation amazingly well, you can improve reputation and get more sales/

Here, you’ll learn five insightful tips to transform your eCommerce customer service by investing in your team.1. Decide What “Amazing Customer Service” Means

Before you train your employees on how to provide amazing customer service, you need to clearly define what it means.

One way to do that is with a customer service vision statement. It includes:

  • Standards. These are micro-goals that drive your team towards customer satisfaction, e.g. “We will respond to email messages within 6 hours”
  • Strategies. These are strategies like “Hire empathetic people for customer support team” that maximize customer satisfaction.
  • Goals. These are critical goals, e.g. “Achieve XX percent customer satisfaction rate.”

The vision document is critical to set the direction for your team, so you need to make it clear. If some strategies need an explanation, illustrate them in a process infographic like the one.

Create an email newsletter and add the vision statement to share it with the team. Also, make it available at all times through your company’s document sharing service.2. Create a Customer Service Process Flow

A customer service process flow is a visual representation of processes and procedures used to solve queries. It’s created for eCommerce brands to standardize service provision.

Your team needs it because it gives step-by-step instructions.

To create the flow:

  • Describe a typical interaction between a customer and an operator. Make it step-by-step to include every communication touchpoint.
  • Consider different scenarios. The flow must have different touchpoints based on the customer’s answers.
  • Include an explanation of each touchpoint in a separate document. It will help your team understand the purpose of each action.

3. Empower Employees to be Creative Problem Solvers

Allow employees to have some room for creative solutions without consulting the leader or manual on everything. Empowering instead of directing employees increases job satisfaction and quality of service.

But this requires your team to have appropriate knowledge and expertise. So, you need to have the best resources – guides, videos, tutorials – available.

Here are some great examples:

Does your team need to develop a new skill? Consider having on-site training workshops by customer service experts. The workshops are customized to meet the unique needs of your employees.

Remember that employee education should be an ongoing process to keep service quality high and hit sales goals. Consider having an educational budget to address training needs.4. Give Your Employees the Best Customer Service Apps

Live chat and chatbots are the best tools to reduce the response time and improve the customer satisfaction rate.

Live chat has the highest customer satisfaction rate because it allows real-time communication between the operator and the customer. All you have to do is add a live chat widget to your website.

Here’s how it could look like.

Next, a chatbot can help your team complete more queries by taking care of repetitive, common questions.

A chatbot on an eCommerce store can guide customers to popular pages like shipping policies, returns, and order status.

This way, you’re giving customers self-service options, which helps to take a lot of queries off the shoulders of your team.

Like live chat, you can add chatbots to all websites. For example, if you’re using a popular website platform like WordPress, install a WordPress chatbot. The same goes for Shopify and other eCommerce platforms.5. Talk to Your Employees

A lack of regular feedback between employees and managers leads to a lack of motivation and subsequent deterioration of service quality.

Consider these meetings to keep the feedback flowing:

  • Weekly group meetings. During these, you can collect suggestions, tips, and learn about issues the employees experience while working
  • Bi-weekly one-on-ones. These meetings can help to collect feedback from individual employees.

Related: How to Improve Customer Experience Using Employee Feedback Data6. Track and Measure Key Customer Service KPIs

Try using NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score).

NPS is a customer satisfaction metric that can help you evaluate the quality of your service. To calculate it, you need to use website surveys. They have one question about how likely your customers are to recommend your service to others.

The customers respond using a 0 to 10 scale, with 0 being “Not likely” and 10 being “Very likely.”

Here’s how to interpret their answers:

  • 0 – 6 – these customers are very likely to churn
  • 7 – 8 – customers use your company, but they’re not ready to become loyal yet
  • 9 – 10 – these are the loyal customers who are likely to buy again.

CSAT is an indicator of customer satisfaction. CSAT surveys can contain multiple questions (including the open-ended ones).

Important: customers aren’t always willing to explain the rating they’ve given and skip questions. If you need to collect more detailed feedback, consider using a free chatbot that you can customize to ask customers to share their experiences.

Related: 10 Surefire Ways to Improve CSAT Score.Conclusion

Never stop investing in customer service.

It’s a critical part of eCommerce customer experience, which is something that many of your customers value more than price. Improving the skills of your customer service team is the best way to maintain a positive reputation, delight customers, and increase sales.

Pawel Lawrowski is Head of Growth at Tidio. He has 10+ years of experience in marketing and sales in the IT industry and enjoys sharing his knowledge with others. You can connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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or more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes article: Do You Have The Guts To Refer To Your Competition? Burger King Does.

The post Guest Post: A Guide to Training Employees to Deliver Outstanding eCommerce Customer Service appeared first on Shep Hyken.

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