Can You Be Acustomer Service Rep From Home For E Commerce

eCommerce businesses have the luxury of functioning like standard retail companies, but without the significant overhead of managing a storefront. However, this also means that eCommerce companies need to accept a more responsive online support and service middle to meet high customer expectations.

In this customer service guide, you'll learn nearly common issues, and get eCommerce-specific strategies, similar how to build your client service squad and the software applied science that yous'll need to run a best-in-grade customer service department.

What is eCommerce Customer Service?

eCommerce client service (sometimes spelled e-commerce customer service or Ecommerce customer service, or known every bit eCommerce customer support) is the combination of strategies, people, and applied science used to provide customers of online stores.

How is eCommerce Client Service Different from Retail Customer Service?

eCommerce customer service differs from retail customer service because of a diverseness of factors. These factors include:

Mobile – With 70% of Americans shopping online having a customer support that prioritizes mobile is a must. This means online chat, click-to-telephone call, and SMS text support have quickly become a norm for mod customer experience strategies.
Time to Respond – For eCommerce businesses, your competitors are literally one-click away. If your potential customers take questions near your product, your service agents demand to exist able to respond immediately their omnichannel customer service software. In fact, consumers expect a response from in app live chat support in under a minute!
Higher Expectations – Post-obit time-to-resolve, in general, eCommerce shoppers accept unnaturally high client expectations of online brands. For instance, consumer expectations effectually electronic mail resolutions have besides increased from over 12 hours to nether iii hours. Expectations for online brands don't finish in that location. Everything about your online feel must be as convenient every bit possible. That includes the shopping, cart, review, shipping, and recommendation experience.
Time to Resolve – The goal for customer service is to increment client satisfaction. That ways time-to-resolve client issues is at the forefront of your service team's tasks. Information technology's also peak-of-heed for your customers. With time to reply becoming quicker, consumers too await their bug to be resolved faster-than-e'er earlier.

eCommerce Customer Service Software

When building your customer service department, or simply upgrading your processes to meet modern expectations, your customer service platform will be key.

With eCommerce businesses requiring faster response and resolution times, leveraging a seamless omnichannel ecommerce client service platform volition be essential. Seeking out a software system that includes integrated Voice, IVR, live chat, email, SMS, and lifetime conversation history volition exist disquisitional in converting your call center into a turn a profit center. Beneath are the basic customer service software requirements you'll demand for your eCommerce business.

eCommerce Customer Service Software Features:

A people-centered arrangement. This means your software platform should care for visitors and customers as people, and not as tickets that are tracked in outdated ticketing systems.
Lifetime conversation history – Your ecommerce customer service software should house a customer'south entire purchase and conversation history in a centrally-located system for agent'south to access.
Integrated voice and IVR. Regardless of the increasing trend to towards live chat and SMS, Phonation and IVR are all the same essential. A organization that includes both is a must-accept for e-commerce businesses.
Customer facing self service knowledgebase. Empower customers to notice the answers to common questions that they have without having to telephone call or be routed to back up agent.
Web and In-App chat. As an eCommerce retail business, your online store must-have live spider web conversation. This is ane of the fastest-growing support channels, and your customers volition be expecting to have their questions answered within minutes.
Social. With your eCommerce business taking a more active function in social media marketing, you'll desire to provide your customer service agents with the adequacy to offer social media client service. This means they tin can respond to customer requests/questions on Facebook or Twitter straight from their back up system.
Seamless, unified communications. All of these great features mean nothing if the experience isn't seamless for customers. This ways that your customer service platform must have a truly seamless experience where consumers tin conversation with you on the phone, take the chat to email, and resolve it via SMS without being routed to unlike agent's or having your agent'southward miss a beat.
Integrations. As your e-commerce business grows you lot'll want to ensure that yous customer service system can scale with you. This means having customer service integrations to other best-in-form software platforms like Shopify, Magento, BigCommerce, and more.

WHY GLADLY

Drive revenue from your client service squad with Gladly.

Learn more than

Edifice Your eCommerce Customer Service Team

If you have already selected a customer service platform for your eCommerce team, then you'll want to start thinking virtually the people and roles you lot'll desire for your team.

The size and roles of your team will vary depending on the size of your business and how many requests you receive on a daily footing. For example, a call center or customer service agent can realistically handle 20-50 calls per work day depending on the scope of those calls. Using that metric, you lot can determine how many customer service agents yous should bring on to your team to ensure all customer problems are handled in a timely manner.

Common Roles on Your Client Service Team

Below you'll find the most common roles of a ecommerce client service team and their general responsibilities. Keep in mind your client service department is not limited to these roles, just most due east-commerce businesses nosotros've seen include the following:

Customer Intendance Amanuensis also known equally Customer Service Agent, eCommerce Customer Service Representative or Customer Service Specialist – Customer service representatives or agents are your company's first line of defense force. They are customer-facing roles that interact direct with customers and potential customers to answer whatever questions or resolve whatever issues they're experiencing. Typically, you can leverage your client service representatives across all advice channels.
eCommerce Call Centre Agent – Call eye agents are like to standard customer intendance or service agents, however, some support teams have teams entirely dedicated to fielding inbound calls.
Remote Client Service Representative or Remote Telephone call Eye Agents – Remote customer service representatives and agents make full the aforementioned role equally their standard counterparts. However, with businesses increasingly moving to distributed models, and eCommerce businesses opting for lower overhead, remote customer service reps will likely compose a majority of service teams. Read more: Remote Contact Center Agent Job Description
Customer Service Supervisor or eCommerce Client Service Manager – Client service supervisors or managers oversee the preparation and day-to-24-hour interval operations of a team of customer service or contact centre agents. They are also responsible for the monitoring of performance and ensuring positive customer satisfaction levels.
Multilingual Customer Support Specialist – A multilingual client support or service specialist fulfills the same duties of a standard customer service representative with the exception that they can serve customers who speak various languages.
Director of Client Experience – The manager of client experience is tasked with the overall strategy that ensures customer satisfaction and propels the company forward using feedback from consumers, agents, and more than.

Taking Your eCommerce Customer Service Team Remote

If you're an eCommerce retail company, then you're already operating in a fairly distributed model from the consumer side. In an effort to farther reduce operational costs and overhead, we're seeing more than eCommerce companies move their service and back up to fully remote models. Below are a few best practices for taking your eCommerce customer service remote:

Offer all customer service channels via the web
Empower autonomous customer service with built-in knowledge bases and self-help
Centralize customer service team collaboration and teamwork
Implement customer service solutions that support and enhance remote teams
Accept onboarding and training of remote hires seriously

Click hither to notice a complete guide to taking your client service team remote.

Best Practices for eCommerce Customer Service

Whether you have congenital your ecommerce customer service team, or not, you'll want to ensure y'all have these all-time practices in place. These ecommerce customer service best practices enable yous to easily scale your team to growing demands.

Beginning with documentation. This includes everything from edifice out your self-service knowledgebase to live chat scripts for your team. Documentation gives your team a process and procedures to plow to when they have questions, too as the documentation customers need to answer of import questions in a timely mode.
Delivery and Shipping Policies. Cipher irritates customers more than unclear aircraft and delivery policies. With Amazon having implemented same-day and 2-24-hour interval shipping, it'southward up to your brand to clearly communicate shipping policies to your customers, or gamble losing them.
Return and Warranty policies. In some cases, your ecommerce business volition take returns. What your render policy is will be a strategic determination. However, these policies should be clear and made known to customers from the get-go.
Sizing information. If you sell clothing, then it's important to provide more information than is necessary with regards to sizing. Customers take countless brands to choose from, and making information technology articulate what volition and will not fit them is of the utmost importance in their buying decision.
360 degree customer service. As a best practice you'll need to employ customer service software that offers a consummate and lifetime view of the customer. You'll also want to prioritize a system that does away with outdated ticketing and instance system and leverages a people or customer-centric platform.
Offer live chat. Today'due south modern buyer requires firsthand resolution to questions. If your self-service documentation does non have that answer, y'all'll need customer service agents on alive web chat bachelor to handle any and all questions.

How to Improve eCommerce Customer Service

If y'all've already implemented the above all-time practices, and are however wondering how to improve eCommerce customer service, and so use the tips below.

Be multichannel. Gone are the days where simple phone support would suffice for your customers. Nowadays, modernistic consumers need to have their questions resolved via eery channel be-it phone, SMS, email, live conversation, app chat, or more. Implement a platform that has a unified communications system that enables agents to speak with consumers across all channels without ever skipping a beat.
Proactive customer service. Beingness proactive tin can keep way towards customer satisfaction. If yous want to ameliorate your customer service, and then it'south only natural to get more proactive with your strategies. Prepare automatic communications and follow-ups when your customers receive their products to ensure there are no issues. This tin can assistance reduce the number of negative reviews and create a positive experience that will go along customers coming back.
Offer 24-hour support. Consumers are now shopping at all hours of the day. Especially in eCommerce. To improve your customer service, you'll desire to build out a 24-hour support line to address questions at all times.
Measure out customer satisfaction. Utilise customer satisfaction scores to collect customer feedback. Continuously measure to notice areas of weakness or improvement.
Keep it personal. Leverage modern customer service engineering science for eCommerce to enable your agents to personalize every interaction. By leveraging an entire conversation history, your agents can proactively accomplish out and amend the customer feel of every customer.

eCommerce Customer Service Training

Whenever y'all expand your eCommerce customer support team, you'll want to make sure every member is properly trained on the best practices for responding to and handling client requests. Below are a number of resources you can utilise to railroad train your eCommerce customer support team.

Customer Service Tone Tips
Call Centre Grooming Quiz
Assessment for Call Center Agents
Customer Service Chat Cess
Client Service Scenarios Test
Empathy Exercises for Customer Service
Listening to Customers

eCommerce Call Eye Do'southward and Don'ts

Within your eCommerce call eye you'll want to be careful of the activities that you do and don't practise.

Do use a multichannel strategy in your eCommerce call center.
Do non limit yourself by using slice-meal software systems.
Do leverage online conversation.
Practice not only utilise phone support.
Do provide a personalized experience for each customer
Do not treat every customer as if they don't thing.
Exercise train your e-commerce Phone call centre to use compassionate tones and language.
Do not treat every customer interaction every bit a defensive boxing.
Exercise leverage your IVR to properly route calls to the amanuensis that volition resolve it the fastest.
Do not create an infinitely long IVR tree.
Exercise give customers the option of resolving their problems via other communication channels if your phone call center is experiencing a high call volume.
Exercise not force customers to wait and heed to hold music for over 5 minutes.

Customer Service Issues in Ecommerce

You lot've congenital your client service team, chosen software, know the best practices and do'due south and don'ts, so what's left? There are a number of mutual customer service problems in eCommerce that yous should expect to face.

Not delivering an omnichannel client feel. Customers purchase and communicate across multiple and dissimilar touch points. One of the most mutual client service problems in eCommerce is communicating with customers across all of them. Oftentimes you lot'll notice eCommerce companies opting for only web chat or email support, and not offering phone to lower overhead costs. This is a common outcome that fails to address 57%+ of the market place that wants to be able to reach support via phone.
Maintaining customer loyalty. With and so many brands and choices for customers to choose, maintaining brand loyalty is a common result that faces eCommerce support teams. Part building loyalty is gathering client feedback and using that to improve your products and services. Customers love knowing that their stance matters to your business, and you take every word they give you lot into consideration.
The giant headache of a return, cancellation, or refund. For about customers, returning a product for a refund is an absolute headache. They have to go through the procedure of locating a return label, press, and then shipping the item back, all inside a specified return engagement! This is a mutual customer service issue in ecommerce that can be speedily addressed and mitigated by providing all of the information needed to customers clearly in a followup email. This fashion everything is accessible for them to brand a return chop-chop.
Knowing your customers and providing personalization at scale. Later on speaking with several hundred customers per calendar week, agents can go robotic in their communications. This customer service issue is easier to accost through technology. Providing an "at-a-glance" client communication system that allows your agents to meet the unabridged advice history of online visitors in a single view. This enables agents to quickly review the history and brand the feel as personal equally possible by referencing past dialogues.
Not Solving bug instantly. Online shopping is about convenience. When your online visitors take questions, you need to exist able to solve them instantly.
Managing customer expectations throughout the delivery process. From the time a customer purchases your production, until it's delivered, is a metaphorical "black hole." Nigh customers have no visibility into the products whereabouts during this time. This is an opportunity for your customer service department to thrive by providing personalized updates based on your buyer's mutual inquiries. This means understanding what questions they volition ask and providing automatic messages with the data they're looking for strategically.
Seasonality and peak buy times. During peak seasons, your client service squad may experience high call volumes and wait times. During height times, you'll want to implement safeguards such as leveraging your IVR to route calls to appropriate agents, equally well equally offering customers other channels of advice such every bit alive chat or text. Y'all can read a complete guide on strategies for managing high call volume hither.

Final Thoughts: eCommerce Customer Service

A vast majority of customer service issues you'll experience in due east-commerce volition revolve around time-to-reply and time-to-resolve client questions. Having a modern customer service platform that is built for personalizing the customer experience is an absolute necessity for today's enervating consumers. Did you know that Gladly provides a unmarried tool for seamless communications across all channels (social, email, phone, SMS, etc)? The platform enables teams to deliver a service that is radically personal.

About Gladly

Gladly is a customer service platform for digitally-focused B2C companies who desire to maximize the lifetime value of their customers. Unlike the legacy approach to customer service software, which is designed around a ticket or instance to enable workflows, Gladly enables radically personal customer service centered effectually people to sustain customer loyalty and drive more acquirement.

The earth'southward almost innovative consumer companies like Godiva, JOANN, and TUMI use Gladly to create lasting customer relationships, not one-off experiences.

Get started