Customer service is an important aspect of running a successful business. Whether you are selling products through your e-commerce website or a marketplace, effective customer service that is 24*7 is beneficial can be beneficial to boost sales and acquire loyal customers.
96% of customers admitted that customer service is an important factor in determining their loyalty towards a brand.
For starters, leveraging automation in customer service helps you solve your customers’ queries without any involvement of support agents. It also creates opportunities for you to deliver personalized shopping experiences.
In this post, we will explore the best ways to automate e-commerce customer service and delight your customers.
But first,
What is E-commerce Customer Service Automation?
E-commerce customer service automation is the process of integrating customer service with technology to streamline operations and provide quick and consistent responses to customer queries. The focus of automating customer service is to tend to customer requests as efficiently as possible without the need for human intervention or time consumption.
E-commerce customer service automation is a must if –
- Your support team spends a lot of time working on repetitive support tasks
- Your support inbox is always full of hundreds of requests and queries
Before we take a look at the different ways to bring in automation into your support processes, let us explore some of the benefits of leveraging this strategy for simplifying customer interactions.
Benefits of E-commerce Customer Service Automation
Automated customer service offers a multitude of benefits for e-commerce businesses because:
- 24*7 Availability – It offers 24*7 support to your customers irrespective of the time zone or location they are situated at. You can resolve customer queries even when your team is offline.
- Increased Productivity – With automation, you can respond to more support tickets in less time. This speeds up the entire query resolution process, allowing your support agents more time to spend on priority tickets.
- Real-time & Quick Responses – Automation lowers the ticket resolution time for your customers as you deliver quicker responses to their queries. It also reduces the amount of human errors in the responses.
- Reduced Costs & Overheads – It brings together multiple support channels under a centralized platform allowing you to switch between various channels with ease. You do not have to invest in multiple tools to manage customer queries. As automation takes over manual repetitive tasks, you do not need to hire and train additional support representatives to handle large volumes of customer queries.
- Empowered Customers – This allows customers to utilize self-service solutions like a customer portal, knowledge base, chatbots, and more to find quick resolutions to their problems. They do not have to contact human agents or rely on them to get their doubts solved.
5 Ways to Automate E-commerce Customer Service
E-commerce customer service automation offers proactive support to customers with what they need without having to contact any human agent. Here are a few ways you can automate your e-commerce customer service.
1. Automated Ticketing Management
The next aspect of customer service that you can automate is streamlining the process of customer service ticket assignment. No support agent would be happy sorting through dozens of support tickets to find the ones that are relevant to their department.
By using an automated ticket management system, you can categorize customer queries based on the problem type or department and automatically assign them to the correct team. The system also checks for the number of open tickets, availability of support agents, and a host of other factors before assignment. This ensures that your support agents have a balanced queue of support tickets and enough time to resolve them successfully.
You can also configure auto-responders or triggers to send acknowledgment emails to customers that their request has been received by the concerned team and is being currently processed.
2. Chatbots
AI-powered chatbots have become an indispensable part of E-commerce websites these days. They help customers at every step of their shopping journey by addressing their queries around the clock. They can also handle large volumes of queries simultaneously which is impossible for human agents. From providing answers to basic questions to addressing complex queries, chatbots take your customer service to the next level by helping you forge stronger customer relationships.
Investing in AI-powered chatbots can automate your query resolution process and offer personalized assistance to customers as well. Based on the customer queries, the AI engine can detect the ones that might require human intervention and forward them to the relevant support department. It can seamlessly conduct this agent handover without disrupting the customer experience.
3. Centralized Inbox
The first effective automation you can utilize is to have a centralized inbox for managing all your customer queries. This includes incoming questions from various channels like live chats, email, social media, WhatsApp, and so on. A unified inbox gathers all these queries and presents them in a single platform for easy access and timely resolution.
As customers today look for seamless omnichannel support, it is advisable to consolidate their inquiries from various channels into a single dashboard. This enables quicker and more organized responses. Furthermore, a shared inbox will automatically alert your team about the new messages. This will ensure that no customer query goes unnoticed. Any customer queries, regardless of which channel they are received on, will have minimal response times.
Jason Mueller from a1autotransport.com states: “Having a central inbox can be handy for any type of business. As we deal with many types of car shipments coming in from a variety of different sources and emails, having it in one inbox makes customer support a breeze, and it leaves you better organized as well.”
4. Hands-free Responses
Most of the time, e-commerce customers have similar inquiries like order-related updates, returns process, refund status, and so on. Hence, instead of spending time crafting individual responses, you can automate this process by creating templates. You can import the template into your messages in just a few clicks and send responses to your customers in no time.
Templates are pre-written messages that are automatically sent to the customers as a response to their standard questions. You can personalize the messages by adding desired dynamic content fields, such as customer name, shipment tracking link, order ID, and so on.
5. Self-serve Customer Portal
Last but not least, you can set up a self-service portal that allows customers to discover solutions to their queries on their own. In fact, 70% of customers expect brand websites to include a self-service application.
A self-service portal like document360 provides customers with all the necessary information to resolve simple and repetitive issues themselves. This portal is usually connected to a knowledge base that offers the right information to customers thereby reducing the need to rely on a human support agent. This reduces the number of customer inquiries being sent to your support team.
For example, Amazon offers an intuitive self-service portal that allows customers to directly contact the team or figure out things on their own. Check out the screenshot below that allows customers to track their orders, receive assistance with respect to their Prime membership, manage their payment information, and more.
Wrapping Up
E-commerce customer service automation helps you deliver high-quality customer service at all times. It refines and streamlines customer interactions using various tools like AI-powered chatbots, self-service portals, messaging templates, and more. This reduces the workload on your support team and enables them to cater to other important tasks.
Customer service automation when done in the right manner can make every customer interaction a delightful experience. It will show your customers that you care and boost loyalty. Leverage automation to simplify your e-commerce customer service and amp up your overall customer experience.
This is a guest post by Kruti Shah
Kruti Shah is a content writer and marketer at The Marketing Drama. She loves to write about insights on current trends in Technology, Business, and Marketing. In her free time, she loves baking and watching Netflix. You can connect with her on Linkedin.