The value of customer care to online retailers

23rd
OCT

The value of customer care to online retailers

Posted by Michael under Online Retail

Online retailers have limited opportunities to impress their customers with their service – but does it matter?

Yes – customer service isn’t just about solving problems, it’s about building relationships, the chance to upsell related and valued additional items and to correct any misapprehensions the customer may have. It’s also a way of establishing a benchmark for what your customers need to know online that you aren’t currently telling them, or to deal with fast-moving situations, like postal strikes, that might otherwise adversely affect your business.
No – if things go well, the customer never needs to explore how customer service operates. If your goods are easily and sensibly displayed, with enough information to answer customer queries, your order system is simple and your delivery process is fast and efficient, there should be no reason for people to have to call you. If they don’t have questions that aren’t answered by your website and they don’t have problems after placing their order, they never get involved with customer service personnel.

This view is borne out be a piece of research undertaken by Loudhouse Research which suggests that where online retail is concerned, in the phase leading up to a purchase, both email and phone are overrated as part of the customer experience. Almost half the online shoppers who responded to the survey said that they prefer to find information about a retailer’s products themselves rather than contact the company. Only 19% favoured an email approach to a online retailer and only 18% used, or were interested in, phone support.

But there could be other reasons that customers don’t appear to value customer service. Another finding of the research was that ‘multichannel consistency is a big problem’ and if you don’t know what multichannel support is, relax – it simply means the variety of ways that a customer could get an answer to a question; so for any company this could be by sending an email, making a phone call, using a chat system, using a webform on the company website or writing a letter. Slightly under 25% of the shoppers surveyed said that they received consistent responses from agents across the various customer care channels. In other words, when they asked a question by phone, the answer they got was different to if they asked a question by email. If your customer service is inconsistent, then it’s not surprising that people don’t use it!

Because the relationship with customers is less personal, there are things that online retailers need to learn to do better than actual retailers:

1) Ensure you have simple navigation around your site, swift download times, instant access to information and good ways of sharing customer reviews and responses with other customers
2) Make sure all your channels have the same training and same information so they offer the same solutions to problems. And make sure those channels are swift and responsive.
3) Build in trust factors such as secure payment systems and information about how stored data can and cannot be used as well as sending confirmation emails, information about order progress and either email or telephone follow ups on a certain number of customers to ensure you learn from their experiences – but don’t call them customer satisfaction surveys because that implies that you expect the customer to be satisfied and your efforts to be satisfactory, which is simply a way of saying you’ve prejudged the situation and you’re sure you’re doing everything right!

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