Providing Strong Customer Service on A Tight Budget
If you are looking to get some extra income for your interior design business, you might consider selling furniture and home decor on your website. In that case, to ensure its profitability on a saturated market, you need to provide a very good customer service.
In most cases, customer service will be the only interpersonal contact a shopper will have with your ecommerce operation. Therefore, it is imperative to ensure the experience is positive.
However, doing it right—offering 24/7/365 live representatives—can be exceptionally costly for smaller operations with limited resources. Still, by providing strong customer service on a tight budget can be done—if you implement the following recommendations.
Answer Questions Before They’re Asked
A well-considered FAQ page can head off a lot of customer service calls before they occur. However, you must be careful to answer questions customers actually have, rather than answers to questions you want them to ask. What’s the difference? While an FAQ page can be a selling tool, it is better thought of as a service tool. To ensure its thoroughness, have your customer service reps (CSRs) log all questions they get. After analyzing the results, cover the most frequently recurring ones on your FAQ page.
With the advancement of conversational AI, businesses can take this process a step further by using chatbots to interact with customers and gather valuable insights. By leveraging AI, you can automate responses to frequently asked questions and continuously improve your FAQ page based on real-time customer queries.
Make sure descriptions and other information on your product pages answer those questions as well. If people are making the same inquiries over and over again, you need to fill a hole somewhere.
An easy to understand, highly detailed returns and exchanges policy page will also preempt a lot of calls.
Educate Customers Thoroughly
Your product descriptions should answer all of the key questions a customer might ask regarding size, color, materials, manufacturer and the like. For example, when you’re considering how to sell furniture online, be sure to provide detail descriptions in the copy so your CSRs will get fewer calls. Similarly, well-produced video clips can provide more information – as well as tutorials – to help shoppers make informed purchases.
In other words, the more you do to tell customers what to expect, the less risk you’ll have of disappointing customer service calls. Tips and tricks articles, informative blog posts, detailed how-to guides and online instruction manuals can educate your customers without direct human interaction.
Customer Service Software
Chatbots make it possible for you to provide customer service around the clock without human intervention. Yes, it will take a bit of effort and expense to get set up, but once you have the system in place and running well, your costs will be minimal. Yes, you’ll pay for the software, but the outlay is much less significant than what is required to support a living being.
Define Hours Clearly
If you can only afford to staff the phones during certain times of the day, state the hours clearly on your site next to the customer service number. This, by the way, should be easy to locate under a tab labeled: “Contact Us”. Too many sites send customers on a scavenger hunt to figure out how to get a sentient presence on the phone. This frustrates people and frustrated customers tend not to make subsequent purchases. By the way, include the time zone when you give the hours live CSRs are available. It helps callers to know you mean 9:00 A.M. Eastern, Central, Mountain or Pacific when you’re in the U.S.
Consider Outsourcing
Virtual office services, freelancers, or third-party CSR companies can fill the gaps, but you have to be careful to ensure they know your products and policies very well before exposing them to your customer base. While convenience and cost effectiveness are definite pluses where this is concerned, alienating customers is also a very real possibility. Outsourcing customer service can be an effective solution, but you have to be very careful in your implementation.
Providing strong customer service on a tight budget can be done. It’s simply a matter of thinking through the issues and putting solutions in place for the most common ones.
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