Online customer service; discover some ideas to improve this
Do you want to know the most common mistake that online businesses make? Well, they think that customer service is not important.
Indeed, many of the companies that sell products or services online think that by having very limited contact with the customer, they don’t need to pay too much attention to customer service.
Well, in fact, it is just the opposite! By having a limited contact with the user, any query or claim redoubles its value, as this will be one of the few occasions (perhaps, the only one) for us to earn their trust. And gaining the trust of customers in the online world means almost everything…
In this article we are going to look at some ideas to improve the online customer service of your business. Here we go!
First of all: be accessible!
Have you seen any of those online businesses that hide their means of contact in the depths of their website? Don’t you think it seems as if they wanted to prevent you from getting in touch with them? Does this give you a sense of trust? Would you hire a service or buy a product from them?
Hiding your means of contact or offering these in a very limited way is a bad idea. Nowadays, customer service tends to multi-channel – to facilitate different customer contacts, both online and offline, and even Omni-channel – in order to offer all existing contact channels -, so if you only provide one email address, this might not be enough.
There are loads of means in order to offer an online customer service: from email to chat, via WhatsApp or, social networks. You are the one who must decide the communication channels that you open to clients, and obviously you will have to take care of them properly (If you provide customer service in social networks but afterwards you forget about it, this will be useless and it will also be counterproductive).
So think about the means that you have and be as accessible as you can. Your customers will appreciate it.
Talk to professionals
Have you thought about leaving customer service in the hands of your grandmother Antonia, who is 91 years old, and who cannot stop talking about the last soap opera? Even if your grandmother Antonia is very nice and will take care of everything because she loves you very much, she may not be the right person for this.
Online customer service requires using the right professionals and having the proper means in order to carry out this. Do you know the profile of the community manager? It is one of the professional profiles that have emerged during the last years in order to fulfil these needs in companies, although this is not the only one. Whatever your choice, the person responsible for online customer service should be well trained, and should know all about the online world. So leave your grandmother alone and let her watch the telly!
Organise the operation of the service properly
The customer service of an online business is not limited to being a service in which the electronic mail, social networks or the phone are improvised. On the contrary, in order for it to work properly, it will need to have a well-defined structure, functioning and objectives.
For example, ask yourself these kinds of questions: how will the queries be handled if they are quite technical and the people who are responsible for customer service cannot solve these? What is the schedule for resolving queries that need to be fixed? How will we deal with annoyed customers? Will you give your customer service team the possibility to offer some kind of advantage – for example, a discount, – to those users who have suffered a setback with your service? Are you going to somehow unify the management that is generated in the different types of channels? Are there any complaints or queries that are repeated frequently and therefore, you might be able to anticipate an answer? Do you use any type of incident analysis to precisely introduce changes in the company to avoid these incidents?
Customer service is not a minor issue. On the contrary, the future of your company may depend on it, so it would be good to dedicate the time and resources necessary to structure it properly, and you must provide it with the necessary means to use it in order to improve your business.
Provide it with the right tools
If you have an online business it is probably because you are a person who uses technology. And if you have used technology to reach your customers, why don’t you use technology in order for your employees to carry out their work properly?
Once you have several open communication channels, a professional team and a good structure, do not forget that we all need the right tools to work properly.
Lucky for us, today there are great tools that can help you with the online customer service. Do you want to manage your incidents in an orderly way? Do you want to be able to solve these incidents properly? Do you want to know how these problems are solved? Do you want to have a history that shows you how these problems have been solved in the past? With Integria IMS you can do these things, and many more …
Because Integria IMS is powerful software that includes, among other features, an incident management system (software help desk) based on tickets (ticketing) which is capable of helping you with the online customer service of your online business.
Do you want to know what the Integria IMS help desk tool can do for you? Click here:
https://integriaims.com/en/product/help-desk-software/
Or you can send us any questions you might have about Integria IMS. You can easily do that by using the contact form that can be found at the following address: https://integriaims.com/en/company/contact/
And don’t forget to leave a comment in the comment section! And remember that…
The Integria IMS team will be happy to help you!