Customer service logistics – As an e-Commerce business owner, you understand the importance of delighting your customers, right? Delighted customers are the ones who can help your business grow! Your customers’ experience will determine how good of a reputation your e-commerce company enjoys in the market. The pandemic has demonstrated a paradigm shift where we see that many businesses have switched online and are taking advantage of top-ranking e-commerce platforms to conduct their sales.
Customers are looking for simple and smooth experiences, and that’s where customer service enters the picture in e-commerce logistics. How can we describe it? It is the list of activities aimed at enhancing the core service’s value that customers need while offering them a higher satisfaction.
That’s why your e-commerce company must invest in improving its customer service skills. This post will help you understand the importance of customer service in e-commerce logistics and explain how you can improve it.
The importance of customer service in e-commerce logistics
Today, more than ever, customers expect an accurate and on-time delivery while ensuring timely communication. In order to meet this expectation while building loyalty and trust, your customer service is crucial.
Your customer service strategy can help ensure that your customers are kept informed, problems are resolved, real-time information is readily available, and customer retention is improved. Some of the other reasons why customer service in e-commerce logistics is essential are given below.
Improved brand image & positive reviews
Good customer service can help your brand establish its authority in the market. It often leads to memorable customer experiences that can translate to positive customer reviews.
When it comes to e-commerce businesses, the reviews can make them or break them. Good customer reviews can only be obtained when your customers are happy with your service, turning them into your brand ambassadors. As mentioned earlier, e-commerce logistics plays a crucial role for your customer satisfaction.
Customer loyalty & retention improves
Logistics plays a crucial role in ensuring a positive customer experience. For instance, 67% of consumers in the US expect the same, next, or two-day delivery. This implies that your e-commerce logistics should be efficient and quick enough to cater to this expectation. Furthermore, you can ensure a positive experience by improving customer service in e-commerce logistics, thus leading to customer loyalty and retention.
Your repeat customer is willing to spend more on your products and services. Furthermore, an increase of five percent in your customer retention leads to an increase of at least twenty-five percent in profits. When clients consistently have a positive experience with your e-commerce company, there’s no reason for them to look for other companies.
Improving customer service in e-commerce logistics
As an e-commerce business owner, you might not be able to get the speed limit increased for trucks on the highway or come up with means of magically minimising the wait times for other shipping processes. So, what is it exactly that you can do? You can ensure that your company remains committed to customer service and that it continually improves its customer service skills.
So, how do you do that? Check out the following, and do let us know what you think!
1. Thorough & speedy communication
Whether the question is regarding an existing order or a new business inquiry, your customers are looking for answers. Your number one priority in terms of customer service should be communication. However, it should be noted that this must be effective communication.
You want to communicate with your customers as quickly as possible while ensuring that you’re as thorough as possible. The goal is to provide them with all of the details that you have. Why? Because it helps you to build trust.
Effective communication in customer service logistics is comprised of three primary factors:
- Speed
- Consistency
- Honesty
a. Speed
How quickly you communicate with your customers is the backbone of customer service. The quicker you’re at giving them information, the faster you are able to act. That’s precisely what the customers expect from e-commerce companies.
The competition in the e-commerce industry is tough. Let’s say it takes you between two and four hours to respond to a new customer inquiry, and your competitor can respond within thirty minutes; you’re going to end up losing a huge chunk of your customers to the competitor.
Note – you must ensure that you’re compromising on accuracy on account of speed. Your customer service must always provide information that is accurate to ensure a positive customer experience.
b. Consistency
Another important factor of effective communication for customer service is consistency. If you want your customers to trust your brand and continue to do business with you, your communication must be consistent.
This consistency is required in terms of your brand’s voice, its values, and the information that is being divulged. Consider this; you wouldn’t trust a person who’s not consistent in their words and actions, right?
c. Honesty
Expectations should always be realistic, right? Your customers would feel better if they were given the honest picture rather than being bombarded with fake promises. For example, let’s say that an order has been delayed due to shipping issues. The customer reaches out to your customer service and is told that the order is already on its way. What do you think is going to happen?
The customer is going to end up getting more and more frustrated, and you’ll eventually end up losing a customer while also getting a bad review. Always strive for honesty – tell your customers the good, the bad, and the ugly.
This helps you to get ahead of the situation and even resolve issues without losing a customer.
2. Invest in your employees’ learning
When it comes to e-commerce customer service, one thing’s for sure; there’s always room for improvement, and adapting to new technologies and learning new skills is an important part of it.
This means that e-commerce companies have to continuously focus on growing their employees in terms of their skills and knowledge while ensuring that they are up to speed with the upcoming trends and changes. Continually improving customer service representatives will help your business to grow by enhancing customer service.
3. Reduce customer touch points with your team
As a customer, once you submit a support request, it gets really annoying when you keep going from one representative to another. It is important to understand that your customers aren’t interested in hearing from different members of your customer service team; rather, they want their issue resolved.
Furthermore, they do not need to see or hear about your team’s discussion and setbacks while you work towards a solution. At the end of the day, your customers simply want to feel confident and secure knowing that you can cater to their problems.
In a nutshell, your customer service team must be able to solve problems before the problem reaches your customers. As customer service logistics has to connect with various different departments, quick and effective internal communication is recommended in real-time for a speedy solution of issues.
How exactly can you reduce the customer touch-points with your customer service team? Try incorporating the following practices:
- The internal conversation shouldn’t be happening on email threads. Generally, customer service representatives would forward emails to their colleagues. The intention is to get the answer to questions and ensure that orders are moving along. However, these long email threads are confusing, annoying, and complex for the customers.
- Since the conversation won’t be happening on email threads, move it to another platform that doesn’t require an email. You can use apps to chat with your colleagues internally on email threads without looping your customers in the discussion.
- Make it a practice to rely on automatic routing to ensure that the messages are sent to the concerned and right person for the job instead of emailing a person and asking them if they can resolve the issue. This can be done by using reliable and efficient ticketing system software.
4. Omnichannel communication is strongly recommended
We’ve already mentioned that the expectation of your customers is always rising. They expect to be able to connect with your business using email, phone, social media, text messages, and chatbots. Many e-commerce companies are incorporating an omnichannel communication approach, and you should do the same.
It is crucial for your e-commerce company’s success that you are readily available on every channel where your customer might want to reach out to you. Some of the key platforms include email, phone, text messages, social media (including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter), and live chat.
An omnichannel communication approach is what will make your customer service strategy a successful one while allowing you to cater to your customers in the best possible manner.
5. Consolidated communication
This leads us to the unification of your communication with your customers. What is that? When your customer service team jumps from one platform to another, the chances are that valuable information will be lost. Furthermore, there’s also the matter of time being wasted during platform switching. Both of the outcomes are undesirable and will diminish the quality of your customers’ experience.
E-commerce companies opt for shared inbox software that allows them to unify their communication from different channels into a single platform, thus ensuring that no loss of information or wastage of time occurs.
6. Bonus tip – improving your e-commerce website
You can greatly help out your customer service department by ensuring that your e-commerce website is operating optimally. Your e-commerce store might face different kinds of malfunctions. The connection, server, or even the database can fail. A critical step of payment might collapse, or maybe your website ends up working slower than usual.
Such situations can increase the load on your customer service team while also adversely affecting sales. That’s why you should make it a practice to monitor your e-commerce website and make adjustments and improvements to it.
Good customer service is always remembered
In the end, you should always remember that your customers cannot see your warehouses, your team working hard to ensure fulfillment of orders, or even your products (until they get delivered). Their touchpoint with your e-commerce company is when they connect with your customer service.
That’s what makes customer service in e-commerce logistics so significant, and that’s what your customers will remember the most about their experience with your e-commerce company.
Author Bio: Saaqib Ahmad Malik is an experienced content writer with over a decade of experience under his belt. He’s worked as the lead content writer for Wonderful Engineering and enjoys writing about various topics. He’s working with Vertex on two projects, including, Helpcenterapp.com and Senderium.com. Apart from content writing, he is running his own IT company as well.
