The Many Benefits of Customer Service and Support for Ecommerce Brands

_{What’s in it for you and your ecommerce brand if you offer dedicated, thoughtful, and automated customer support? Find out updated statistics + unique benefits of customer service and support in our post below.}

There’s an inside joke that many people often create a Twitter handle ONLY to complain about poor customer service from a brand they feel cheated from.

There’s no denying the fact that your eye will linger longer on negative reviews, compared to many more positive reviews and poorly handled complaints (don’t get us started on ignored) will immediately lead to drop-offs. 

Where will they go next? Usually to your competitor.

Who with their solid customer service strategy will have them coming back for more. 

Repeatedly. 

All ecommerce brands run on similar models- inventory or marketplace. Very often products are also very similar – for eg, currently its wellness products that are trending and coming to fore.

What most ecommerce companies differ on is tech – how the website is coded (design, functionality) & most importantly the service they provide. 

All the money you pour into creating the website, manufacturing the products, and employing your marketing team who in turn pours money into ads (which is getting not as generous in results as it used to be earlier) goes down the drain if you can’t convert a semi-interested customer into purchasing or your poor customer service keeps them from coming back.

Customers have become informed of their rights, and options and see no issue in taking even a small issue and blasting it on social- even one negative review poorly handled leads to loss of revenue and brand reputation. 

Lots of alternative options exist- leading to loss of ROI on ads if you don’t deliver till the end of the funnel – which is no longer considered the traditional end anyway.

All of these reasons show how important it is to offer a well-rounded customer support and strategy across mediums, 24×7.

Need more covincing?

Let’s Talk Numbers

You have a good product. So what?

What your customers remember is you they treated them.

52% of consumers say they have made an additional purchase from a company after a positive customer service experience.

You can increase your revenue by 35% if you provide proactive, personalized customer support– 4-8% more than your competitors!

In a customer support survey by Hubspot, it was reported that in 2021, 90% of leaders reported that customer expectations have increased to an all-time high.

According toMicrosoft, 96% of consumers say customer service is an important factor in their choice of loyalty to a brand.

In fact, if their expectations are not met, or your brand delivers inconsistent customer support, 58% of customers show little hesitation in moving on to your competitor.

33% of them abandoned loyalty because personalization was missing.

72% of consumers expect the agent to “know who they are, what they have purchased and have insights into their previous engagements when they contact customer support. ”

How do these numbers translate into success for your brand?

Benefits of Customer Service and Support

If you’re looking to create a strategy from scratch, don’t forget to read this section in our post- What is Ecommerce Customer Service and Support.

It goes into a lot of options that help you pick out your strategy like-

• Offering omnichannel support
• Optimising with data on your customers
• Offering personalised support and communication
• Using a single helpdesk to track and respond to all queries for seamless brand-customer communication
  etc

And in turn all of these can lead to the below benefits.

Increased Customer Retention

Attracting a new customer can be 6-7 times more expensive than retaining an old one. Read that again.

So when your internal ad and marketing teams have done their best to get customers on to the site- your customer service and support HAVE TO do their best to ensure they are able to navigate your store without overwhelm.

You can do that by working on your UX AND prompting them with helpful navigation pointers through a live chat widget.

If they’re close to ‘Adding to cart’, then be there, immediately with clarification, if they express any doubts.

You can do this via a live chat widget OR respond within a minute to their query on any social media page your brand is on.

Don’t forget post-purchase support. Asking for delivery updates, sending them timely reminders to refill- all of this will keep them buying from you.

Seamless Omnichannel Brand Reputation

Want to see a brand’s reputation get battered in merely a few hours?

Keep an eye out for Twitter trends. It’s the easiest way you can see how customer activism can lead to huge loss in brand reputation.

Not to forget, these days Tik Toks that review brand’s customer support can go viral in hours.

What’s the upside? Stories of good customer support have it in them to go viral too.

Don’t discount word of mouth- a good experience shopping from your brand will spread to friends, family, peers, and colleagues and bring in more sales.

The issue these days is that a brand has to be present across mediums and often communicate parts of the same quert on different channels.

Make sure your brand enables a seamless, unified expeirience across all touch points. You can do this succesfully through a single help-desk.

Plus points if they’re optimised for ecommerce brands!

Increased Confidence = More Sales

An easy and very obvious benefit of customer service and support is that when your customer sees you value their presence, they will trust your brand more.

Even if you make a mistake.

Customers are far more likely to forgive and forget and buy again from you, if you make them feel confident you are there for them, throughout their consideration AND post-purchase journey.

And if your ecommerce brand offers customer service and support round the clock, then expect sales in all hours of the day and night!

CSAT score

CSAT or Customer Satisfaction Score measures how happy your customers are with a purchase or interaction.

Measuring it can require you to run a simple survey (Are you satisfied with your purchase?) or you can look at different metrics like repeat rate, positive versus negative reviews or evaluate their responses.

Choosing a good helpdesk built for ecommerce brands will help make this process easy and automate it- so you put in more effort in actually running the business!

Get Unique Customer Data

How often do your customers buy from you in a month or a year?

Which tier city customers make up more of your customer share?

Are they likely to buy on the weekends or weekdays?

Gathering unique insights is one of the many benefits of customer service and support that can help you target better– think more ROAS on your marketing activities, producing focused content- so much becomes a strength when you can flesh our customers better.

All of this can be gathered with each interaction your customer has with your brand through a single help desk to reduce confusion and overwhelm!

Reduced abandoned cart

Offering support to clarify doubts about shipping, delivery dates, and available discount offers after they have been added to the cart is necessary to reduce drop-offs.

Your reassurance across channels- website, chat or social media, especially through sharing testimonials or expert guidance can help you achieve more sales.

The hard part is already done- all you need to do is convince them their initial decision was a good one and they can count on your for the support!

Reduce Returns and COD Failure Rate

Did you know using SMS, messenger, DMS or even live chat to reconfirm orders and their phone numbers has shown a decrease in return rate and COD failure rate?

Taking that extra step through your help desk and sending automated notifications can be key to increasing your sales and the load on your logistics by preventing these errors.

Scaling Rapidly Without Increasing Overhead Costs

Planning a sale? Getting a series B investment?

With automated customer support via live chat and ecommerce help desk, you can deliver customer service and support irrespective of having a small CX team.

This way your spends and your efforts are primed for success and more sales no matter a sudden rush of traffic or planned PR actvities!

By using a chatbot powered live chat widget created for ecommerce brands, you can in fact deliver support consistently at scale because 70% of all queries just need running it against your data- delivery updates, order confirmation status etc.

This way, your core CX team can concentrate on resolving high human interactions and feel more empowered in their responsibilities.

LimeChat- An Omnichannel Help Desk Uniquely Made for ECommerce Brands

Our human-level AI is our signature chatbot that was made for ecommerce brands only.

Our attention to how the chatbot learns and answers queries that are specific to the ecommerce industry has led to us empowering 125+ D2C brands through conversational marketing- purely through word of mouth.

Looking for Shopify ecommerce service providers? We have 20+ customizable templates that are optimized for eCommerce with strong integration with Shopify apps.

Our Smart Agent Escalation can proactively identify unhappy customers and connect them with human agents whereas our retention campaigns have helped boost retention by over 30% with proactive customer support. 

Ready to give us a try? Book a demo here and we’ll love to have you set up immediately- yes faster than what you expect!

---

Want to know more about how has customer support evolved over time + the impact of AI? Stay tuned for our next blog coming soon!

This post is the second in our Masterclass series on Ecommerce Customer Support & Service, where we will go through an in-depth understanding of the current expectations and strategies some of the best D2C brands use and how to execute them in simple, actionable ways.