Customer experience strategy is the foundation of any eCommerce business for achieving business results. It not only increases ROI but also improves your business as a whole. In the context of eCommerce business and online retail stores, it’s essential to understand what eCommerce customer success is and what it can do for your business.
Customer success is the driving factor that builds brand image and encourages brand loyalty. It describes how a company interacts with customers through mobile or web. Customer support should be the center of your eCommerce business strategy.
According to a survey, 66 percent of the eCommerce industry respondents stated that customer support is an essential factor for them when choosing a brand. Interestingly, by 2020, customer experience has been predicted to be the key brand differentiator.
Let’s have a look at the factors for creating an eCommerce customer success strategy.
5 Main Factors of eCommerce Customer Success Strategy
For endeavors in the eCommerce business, would you settle for incomplete operating plans? If your answer is no, indeed, you have an opportunity to build a complete success strategy for going forward.
E-commerce is undoubtedly one of India’s fastest-growing industries, and it is expected to have 330 million digital buyers by the end of 2020. The e-commerce industry is set to cover a considerable percentage of retail transactions in the coming years.
While the industry and famous players are growing, investing in customer success strategy will help the eCommerce brands gain success in the long run. Here’s a winning customer success strategy that will turn your e-commerce store into a success.
Personalization
Identifying and understanding each customer’s buying patterns and their innate desires is the first step e-commerce stores will need to build a customer success strategy. Personalization is the way to show you, customers, that you understand their desires, and you’ll create a base of long-term, high-value customer support.
For building a successful eCommerce customer success strategy, customer outreach is an excellent place to start. You should reach out to your targeted customers by using email, ads, banners, or phone calls.
You can have one of your customer support team members call the customer that might benefit from a new feature of your product and talk to them about how it will specifically help their business.
Or you can send them an email to inform them about a product that might be of interest to your customer. Many eCommerce brands use email, social media communications, and advertisements as well. Segmentation can also help you here, as you can divide your customer list into a handful of segments and customize your newsletter or emails to each group.
All these personalization strategies can help online eCommerce stores create quality customer support that ensures returning sales.
Multichannel Strategy
A multichannel strategy helps build rapport with your customers. It includes different promotional social media and distribution channels. To create a successful customer service strategy, you can’t rely on one track only. Your customers are on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp. You need to reach your customers for an effective customer success strategy that is often optimized for results. Suppose you think that customers will be impressed by long lists of product features, specs, and product details. Customers don’t care about that.
Most customers want a solution to their problem. Most of them don’t care about the details of the product or how it works. They want to know that it will solve their problem and that it’s easy to use. The goal is to take the service to your customers directly — they shouldn’t have to come and ask for it. Give them a more comfortable life by removing the pain of waiting days for a response.
When you establish a multi-channel strategy, ensure you let your customers know about the options available to them. But most importantly, you should deliver quality customer service across all your business channels.
Proactive Customer Support
According to a survey report, 70% of customers expect an eCommerce website should provide a customer support application. Live chatbots on websites offer a quick way to resolve customers’ queries.
When customers are having issues with any of your products or services, they’ll need customer support. That’s precisely where proactive customer support is a valuable, eCommerce customer success tactic. Instead of making your customers wait for assistance, reach out before they have a chance. Ask if they’re having any difficulties or troubles in using your product.
That’s what proactive customer support is all about. On the other hand, traditional customer support waits for customers to reach out to their executives and solve a problem. Proactive customer support helps before the problems start.
But this outreach support isn’t always about product issues; it’s about giving value support services to your customers. This way, you help your customers take full advantage of your product. You can provide them with helpful resources, product manuals, and so on.
Working on proactive customer support is essential for making that sort of relationship with your customers and plays a crucial role in eCommerce customer success.
Performance Monitoring
This is a common issue in the eCommerce industry. When parts of the eCommerce systems aren’t effectively stitched together, problems can arise when reaching out to your customers. You can perform monitoring regularly by using metrics to judge what isn’t working correctly.
For example, the inventory management and order fulfillment process are the most critical aspects of a successful eCommerce business. If there is some issue in the fulfillment process or inventory management, enterprises rely on delivering products. Here, automation platforms help you guard against the issue, and more. Those pieces of order management can be a big help in determining eCommerce customer success.
When you monitor your eCommerce operations’ performance, you can make sure to give your customers a helping hand before they get annoyed with your service. That keeps the relationship positive and avoids mismanagement.
Leveraging performance metrics checks allow e-commerce players to make their operations error-free and help build a successful customer success strategy.
Customer Support Software
This is an important tactic that you always see in discussions of eCommerce customer success strategy. It can help boost the effectiveness of your customer relationship management.
Using good CRM software helps through automation and make informed decisions to increase your ROI. When a customer query is entered on your website, it gets spread across multiple support representatives, which can be frustrating. And may not be adequately answered.
Using CRM (customer relationship management) software helps you ease the process through ticketing. It enables you to stay connected to your customers’ queries and streamline the process.
Of course, just collecting queries isn’t a viable customer success tactic. You’ll need to provide the right answers to customer queries. This will be easier for small companies, but for big companies putting a CRM system in place for collecting and tracking questions is essential for effective implementation.
Not only product queries will come through an online form, you’ll also get feedback and ideas through your support system. Ensure that your customer support system knows where to record customer queries, requests, feedback, and suggestions so you can analyze them and take action.
In the End
A sensible approach to customer success strategy is what’s needed to grow your eCommerce business. The companies that view customer success strategy as a subset of corporate strategy appear to have drawn substantial value from their efforts. So, proper planning, process, and integrating some of the ideas for customer success is all you need to plan your company’s future.
