Customer support is often the most overlooked aspect of running any business. This is especially true with bootstrapped eCommerce businesses where people wear multiple hats. 

However, according to a recent American Express study, customer support can make or break your business. This study found that 33% of customers would switch providers immediately after poor customer service. In another related study, Qualtrics XM Institute found that about 75% of customers who rated a company “Very Good” on their CX rating are likely to forgive them for a negative experience.

What’s wrong with your Customer Support

“Good” customer support is a subjective term. As such, a lot of eCommerce business owners may agree to the importance of good support while inadvertently continuing to offer a poor experience. 

Knowing where your business stands in terms of customer support experience is the first step in improving your system. 

One of the best ways to track how good your customer support system is with the help of metrics like NPS and CSAT.

NPS, or Net Promoter Score, is a straightforward metric that asks customers one question - how likely are they to refer your business to their friends or family? NPS is measured on a scale of 1 to 10, and the more likely someone is to refer your business to their social circle, the happier they are transacting with you.

CSAT is a metric that is generally tracked after delivering customer support. It asks customers (who have just been offered support) how happy they are with the support experience. The responses are typically measured on a scale of 1 to 5. CSAT is the percentage of positive responses received.

Once you start measuring your NPS and CSAT scores, it is easy to track how your business is doing on a weekly or monthly basis. It also becomes easier to correlate customer support experience with other metrics like revenue growth, product returns, etc. and take corrective action to your customer support workflow.

CSAT scores are down. Now what?

Monitoring your CSAT scores monthly can give you a good idea of what direction your business is headed. If you are consistently clocking over 75% in CSAT, then you perhaps offer good customer support experience.

But what if they are dropping every week? Here is a quick guide on how to fix it. 

Speak with your unhappy customers

The first step to fixing customer support experience is to speak with customers who rated you poorly to understand why they did what they did.

During the call, make it a point to note that you are not offering any guarantees that they are going to see a different resolution, but that you will try your best to see how processes can be improved.

 Once you have spoken to enough customers, you will be able to draw a pattern on the major reasons that lead to unhappy customers.

Make support easy for your customers

AI has made it cheap and easy to support customers. For just a few dollars a month, you can replace your customer service agents with chatbots. But just because you have the technology does not mean it is good for your customers.

A number of studies conducted in the past few years show that customers prefer speaking to a human agent over robots. While chatbots can make your life easier, it is not necessarily something your customers like. 

The best way to make it easy for your customers is to allow them to reach you over platforms that they are used to. For starters, offer a toll-free number that they can connect to from any part of the country. You could make use of a service like Unitel Voice that lets you offer a toll-free helpline for as little as $10 a month.

In addition to this, make your customer support platform-agnostic. Accept support queries over email, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, or any other platform that is popular in your customer circles.

Enable microleadership

As a growing eCommerce business, you may need to build processes that help you scale your business. This includes building clear guidelines for what qualifies for a refund, return, or exchange. You will also need to establish clear TAT guidelines for delivery, and customer support resolution.

But having said that, one of the big reasons driving poor customer satisfaction is inadequate microleadership. Microleadership is a business strategy that gives team members the freedom to show initiative and make decisions without the need to consult a manager or leader. 

Oftentimes, poor customer support experience arises from the inability for agents to make decisions on their own. This delays support resolution, and also creates unhappy customers. By giving support executives the freedom to waive off guidelines on a case-by-case basis, you build a more empowering ecosystem of support agents and also make customers happy and satisfied.

Use technology selectively

Modern SaaS tools make it easy to run an eCommerce store without a lot of overheads. However, it is important to use technology selectively. 

For example, eCommerce stores often deploy a lot of plugins on their sites. While these plugins are meant to improve customer experience, reward loyalty, help track orders seamlessly, and perform similar tasks with ease - they can often clutter the real estate making it difficult for a customer to shop.

It is thus important to be very selective with the tools you pick. Understand where your users are coming from, where they are stuck and find patterns in the bottlenecks. 

Companies are leaning on mobile attribution platforms such as Appsflyer to trace exactly where conversations originate. Stronger mobile attribution leads to smarter decision making.

One way to go about it is to make an impact versus cost graph and start with tools that drive the highest impact in terms of customer experience at the lowest cost.

This will help you avoid bloating your site with unnecessary plugins while maximizing customer happiness.

Deploy predictive analytics

Predictive analytics is the application of data analytics and machine learning to study current and historical data to identify patterns and potential outcomes. The use of predictive analytics is quintessential to an eCommerce setup given that there are dozens of different scenarios that can cause a breakdown in communication with your customer, and cause poor experience. 

Thankfully, modern SaaS based predictive analytics tools are not expensive and let businesses study their customer behaviors intently and with accurate outcome prediction. Understanding when customers churn, and why they do can go a long way in preventing these exact scenarios from occurring.

Invest in training support

When you are just starting out, the founders tend to take on the role of customer support as well. However, as your organization grows, the role of customer support is delegated to specialists. 

The truth however is that nobody can have the same level of product knowledge, business ownership or the drive to deliver great customer service like a founder does. Investing in processes and training support is just critical to ensuring great support. 

Training the support agent on the product features and business process is just the start. Follow it up with extensive soft skills training. Agents need to learn to value the customer’s time. They also need to be trained extensively with the help of past support issues - this gives them real world insights into what went wrong, and how such situations can be rectified.

Lastly, communication skills are important. Training your agents to speak clearly and articulately goes a long way in ensuring happy customers and great support experience.

Customer support is a continuous learning process

Customers evolve. Customer preferences and expectations change. And so should your customer support process. What worked yesterday may not necessarily work today - understanding your evolving customer preferences, benchmarking your guidelines against competitors, and constantly evolving is one of the more meaningful ways to add value to your customer support process and keep your buyers happy.