E-commerce is definitely the fastest growing market in history. In 2017 sales reached $2.3 trillion (with 18 zeros!) and it is predicted to reach $4.5 trillion in 2021, followed by a grow on 15% each year.
With a market this big, it doesn’t matter whether your business is focused on B2B or B2C. You still need to deal with competitors. Sounds obvious, but what makes your company stick out from the others? Research by The Guardian shows that By 2020, customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator. It simply means that the item that was purchased will be forgotten but the service you gave them, will stay in their minds. A very important part of customer experience is customer service, imagine that nearly 75% of customers leave the company because they were not satisfied with customer service! The conclusion is that the real power comes with a proper customer service. But the business is all about numbers, let’s take a look at some stats that prove the importance of customer service:
- “95% of consumers talk about poor customer service experiences with other people” – American Express
- “Happy customers who get their issues resolved, tell about 4 to 6 people about their experience” – White House Office of Consumer Affairs
- “80% of businesses believe they provide excellent customer service, but only 8% of customers agree” – Forbes
- “52% of customers said a good customer service interaction influenced them to purchase more from the company and 58% of those customers recommended the good companies to others” – Forbes
- “Companies with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, as compared to 33% for companies with weak omnichannel strategies”. –Digital Commerce360
- “50% of customers think it’s important to solve product or service issues themselves.” Zendesk
Customer service is a part of all departments and aspects of your business, if you can use it smartly it can help your e-commerce to grow and make customers trust your brand. By providing brilliant customer service we decrease the number of unsatisfied customers and also the number of people who will hear bad things about your company. People will always talk, but let’s make them talk good things.
We shouldn’t forget to always gather insights and monitor the performance of customer service. To think your customer service is good, is simply not enough. You have to give your customer service a special attention, as it is the most important aspect of your business. It decides whether your business is successful or a failure. We cannot control anybody’s mind or behaviour but we can use it for your company’s advantage. By learning from your mistakes, you can improve your processes and build better strategies to boost your relationships with your customers, so you can make them your ambassadors. In other words, make them willing to retain as customers, make further purchases and tell others how awesome you are..
Good customer service is to give to your customer many different ways to solve the issue. The first step is to let your customers help themselves with a help center (you can call it an intelligent FAQ). That way they can search for the issue themselves, before even reaching out to you. It leads to a high ticket deflection and more time for you, to care about the important stuff
“Your most unhappy customers
are your greatest source of learning.”
Bill Gates
To succeed with this, it’s important that you make a well planned and organized omnichannel strategy. The best way to do so, is to invest in a help desk, that enables you to create a seamless omnichannel experience for your customers (Novicell). This way you keep everything in one place, which leads to your business becomes more efficient.
To make it easier to track the performance of your customer service efforts we found an e-book you should read. It’s called “Customer Service Metrics That Matter” and, as the title indicates, it gives you the metrics you should focus on, in your customer service.
The importance of customer service is undeniable, despite solving issues it creates the brand by building relationships with customers. To become the successful one you need to put all the efforts into the growth of your business. As the statistics show the impact of customer service on the business is very strong and it is important for companies to invest in relevant solutions like omnichannel customer service software, a help desk. It is all up to you how you will use the opportunity, but if you are still not sure whether customer service software is the right solution just take a look at our previous blog post where have prepared for you 5 reasons why your e-commerce needs a customer service software.