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How to improve eCommerce Phone Support

In today’s times, most people prefer to use smartphones in their hands to get most of the work done. Buyers today want queries resolved with the same level of ease as they had while making the purchase. A dearth of after-service will make the customer stop using the company’s services altogether. Ecommerce companies around the world know that for a fact. Still, a few eCommerce companies fail to deliver on these vital factors. From bogged-down systems to avoid authority in customer support executives, there can be many reasons for not being able to give excellent service to customers. Here are a few points to pay heed to, if improving eCommerce customer service is your aim:

Strive to Grow

Rigidity in rules brings about an extreme level of detriment to customer service quality. In turn, it makes the customer service representatives perform in a shrinking space, which will harm the quality if nothing else. Here are some of the rules which make for the shrinking space

· Firstly, customer care executives have an obligation to pick up the phone within the first or second ring

· Ending the call within a short period of time which is fixed by upper-level management

· To ask if there is anything one can more to help the customer- each time they talk to him/her

This pushes down the empathy a customer craves from any customer service representative. It makes the customer care executive sound robotic in responses and ends up functioning mechanically. It beats down any level of creativity or adaptability the customer care representative might have employed if he/she wasn’t time-bound. Eventually, it tones down the level of personalization, which is required to make the customer feel valued to the company.

That shows exactly how still, a few eCommerce companies are unable to compete in the market. If you want a great team of customer service representatives, they should be given the authority and autonomy to make quick decisions and maintain a certain customer retention rate. If an eCommerce company sets a high level of the target when it comes to receiving calls, the level of personalization will be affected. When they do not have the authority to make decisions, each issue will take more time to be resolved because of the back-and-forth communication between different departments. If an eCommerce company wants to retain its customers, it must allow the representative's space to provide personalized solutions to them.

Bridging Gaps In Methodologies

Every customer service department exists to serve the customer effectively and efficiently. Still, cumbersome processes and manual procedures do more harm than good to efficiency levels of employees.

Let us look at a few examples. If an employee receives a refund request for an order, what is he/she expected to do? Will he/she look at the whole matter and initiate the refund request? Will he/she direct the call or email to upper-level management and ask them to look in the order? They might not be aware of the details a customer support representative usually does. Can they grant the refund themselves? If not, it will elongate the issue if nothing else. Customers usually ask to talk to the manager if they feel they are not being treated fairly. That will happen for sure if they feel that the customer support representative does not have the authority to make the required decisions. Customers get frustrated if their call is put on hold and a decision is not given in their favor. That can be treated just right with a level of authority shared with the customer service representative.

Here are a few suggestions to sort out the above-mentioned problems:

· Focus on development- Do the same issues get turned into escalations more often than the rest? Does the customer support representative avoid raising specific tickets to upper-level management? A certain level of training is required to make the representatives understand how to proceed if a specific issue is reported.

· Authority- Have the agents been given a certain level of power to make decisions on a lower level? It will stop issues becoming into escalations and make for a motivated workforce and happier customers.

· Methodologies- Is there a specific procedure when it comes to handling issues? Is there an oversight to make sure every employee goes strictly according to the procedures? The approach should be methodological and by-the-book in specific cases to maintain consistency

· Productivity- Do your customer support representatives follow a manual procedure that takes more time than it should have to resolve issues? Do you have a readily available self-help process you can dish out to customers?

If you want your customer service department to grow, you would need to eliminate all unnecessary procedures and streamline methodologies. If the company is a startup or lacks in the number of employees required to do the job efficiently, they can use the services of an eCommerce call center outsourcing company.

Connecting all the dots

An employee can only help out the customers with a certain level of technological tools in their reach. There are applications, which provide a history of customer interactions to better understand what the customer is after and the concern he/she is wont to raise. Even after that, customers are made to feel like strangers with a certain level of apathy, which is caused because the customer doesn’t have the right applications within their reach.

Ideally, this situation wouldn’t exist at all if the customer service department has access to all the right applications and tools. There are many free applications, which help with this too. A company can even rely on eCommerce customer service outsourcing if there is an increasing number of issues raised by the customers, which they are unable to handle.

The best way would be to provide all the right tools to the customer service department accorded with personnel training. An employee could just click and see the customer’s history of interaction with the company. That would enable them to sort out the issue much better. If you aren’t using technological tools to make your work easier, you are spelling doom for the growth of your eCommerce company.