You may have the right product, policies, and reliable pricing as an online store as a one-man shop, and you might do it all like emails, orders, and returns. But most of the time customer service gets sacrificed for more pressing tasks like getting orders out of the door.
Sure, you may hire a Magento development company to help design your website and do other tasks, but in most one-man shops, you’ll solely responsible for customer support which can make or break your business. Meanwhile, it is important to ensure 5-star customer service when you are flying solo.
But what does it mean to provide great customer service, and how can you ensure that every customer has a great customer experience with your company or product when they reach out to you? In this blog post, we’ll list out several ways to ensure 5-star customer service especially when you’re a one-man shop. Let’s get started by defining 5-star customer service.
What is 5-Start Customer Service?
5-start customer services mean following best practices like valuing customer’s time, having a pleasant attitude, and providing enough resources, but that you also take things a step further to exceed rather than just meet expectations.
To meet customer’s expectations and deliver great customer service, follow the tips below and make sure that you’re at the top in valuing your customers.
1. Be Active:
The first and foremost thing that matters a lot while treating your customers is to be active on listing. Yes, your primary goal should be to minimize customer service requests or complaints. Obliviously, you want to hear if the customer didn’t get their products, or their item was damaged in transit. Those things are much important in great customer service.
You don’t want to spend time answering questions about product color, prices, shipping, and return policies. You need to be active in listing customer concern and their appropriate needs:
- Make sure your website is easy to navigate
- Streamline checkout process
- Don’t make shipping/return policy get complicated
- Make use of high-quality pictures
- Write clear, and accurate product descriptions
- Create an FAQ section
- Send order to confirm and shipping confirmational automatically
- Be in contact with the customer after delivery
- Collect feedbacks
2. Respond Quickly:
This could be the major factor in delivering a great or 5-start customer experience because customers want to hear back from you as soon as possible. For customers, time is money, and no wonder in today’s fast-growing time, it has to be and that’s the reason make sure you value your customer’s time.
You need to respond to their every question on a time to get them satisfied with your quality customer services. Also, make sure that you don’t respond to them after 3-4 days or a week as there’s no mean because they will ignore your late-responded emails and messages.
What you can do is respond within 24 hours to make them happy and valued. The more quickly you can begin a dialog with a particular customer, the more quickly you can resolve their issue and ensure they are satisfied.
3. Maintain a Positive Attitude:
You might be heard that a positive attitude will lead to positive outcomes. Well, that’s the fact because a positive attitude is everything, and a positive attitude goes a long way in providing excellent customer service.
The right attitude can help you convert your negative customer into a positive customer experience. It’s important to behave gently while communicating with new leads and existing customers. You can make use of emojis to express your warmth and good humor. Also, you can pick a call if the conversation getting tense.
4. Focus on 24/7 Answering Service:
It’s important that make yourself available all the time over the phone for your customers, when possible. Yes, because most of the time customers prefer to talk on live phone calls when they’re having an issue. Research has also shown that customers prefer telephonic interaction for most of their queries especially payment disputes.
This can be challenging as you can’t answer calls 24/7 even if you provide phone support. Even entrepreneurs have to sleep, and voicemail is not an adequate replacement for a real person. What you can do is when a customer calls you after work hours, they can be redirected to a remote person, who will respond to the calls as a representative of your company. They will take charge of your company and then inform your customers either via text or calls.
Luckily, phone answering is inexpensive, and you only pay for the time that you use. In other words, you only pay when someone calls and that’s why this is the cheapest way you can scale up and offer 24/7 support to your customers.
5. Personalize your Service:
When you run a small business, you may be tempted to use form letters and templates, and use professional language to make your eCommerce store seem more legitimate. That’s the common impulse.
But the fact is that customers want more human service rather than your prepared templated which created by a robot or through the internet. You should be professional, of course, but make things personal rather than pretending to a good friend only.
Meanwhile, keep your word as that will help you connect with your customers on a deeper level, and may even enhance their satisfaction. Ultimately, friendly customer service is important to customer satisfaction.
6. Surprise & Delight your Customers:
It’s one thing to give a 5-star customer service, just as you promise and as your customer expects. The next level of service is giving thought to those things that your customer is not expecting and that would truly delight.
It doesn’t have to be inexpensive, focus on personal attention. You can improve the experience by writing a handwritten note with deliveries and send a follow-up, and personalize message or call after your interaction.
Wrapping Up!
As you can see above, happy and satisfied customers mean a happy eCommerce business. So, if you’re thinking about providing adequate customer service as a one-man shop, think about what you’ve learned here.
Take another look at this list and think about how you can implement them to build a better eCommerce business.
Interested in more tips, and running your own eCommerce store? Check out the M-connect Media now, we’ve got an in-house team of professional eCommerce experts. Dial us to know how we can help you build your store and provide 5-start customer service to your customers.