Excellent customer support is one of the main reasons why customers return. In a HubSpot survey, 77% of customers are likely to share a positive brand experience with others. A whopping 84% of customers are willing to spend more with brands that provide great customer service. Follow the tips below to turn your customer support into a profit center — don’t leave money on the table!
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1. Handle customer inquiries at lightning speed
Today’s customers expect speed and convenience when speaking to customer support. According to Forrester, “two-thirds of customers say valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good service.” By providing instant support, you can impress customers and make them want to stay with you longer.
Using an ecommerce-dedicated helpdesk like Gorgias can help. Because this tool has tight integrations with Shopify, BigCommerce, and Magento, it can show all the key data (e.g., customer’s name, order number, order date) right in your helpdesk’s dashboard. That’s immensely useful to get the full picture of each customer’s profile, and means you avoid switching back-and-forth between systems, ultimately increasing productivity and your response time.
Automations are another way to accelerate response time. You can set rules for common questions, like “where is my order?” and “do you ship to Canada?” so they are automatically answered, meaning your team will have more time to focus on the customer inquiries that can lead to sales.
2. Practice customer service skills
Equipping yourself with essential customer service skills will increase your confidence and expertise when handling support inquiries. It takes time to learn how to deal with customers’ complaints and negative feedback the right way. There are a few key skills to focus on, such as; paying attention to active listening, clear communication, patience, and time management. These skills can take you from a good support agent to a great one.
3. Pick up on customer sentiments
Customer sentiments refer to different emotions that your customers might go through in their service experience. Customer sentiments can be positive, negative, urgent, offensive, or menacing. Find a helpdesk that can help automate sentiment for you. For example, Gorgias’ sentiment tags can help you read the room and adjust your responses accordingly to win customers over, especially in difficult situations.
4. Implement social media customer service
With 4.2 billion social media users around the world, there’s a high chance that your customers are also on social platforms. That’s why you should be taking care of their social conversations (including comments, mentions, and direct messages) in the same way you would react to an email or phone call.
Having a centralized helpdesk is essential for this, so that all your support tickets across any channel are centralized in one place. This way, you can give immediate answers, identify potential customers, increase engagement on your social feeds, build brand trust, and drive purchases.
Some helpdesks like Gorgias help this process through machine learning, which automatically detects if you have a visitor who has the intent to purchase, and then offers them a coupon code. This is another example of how an integrated helpdesk can turn all of your customer service channels into sales opportunities.
5. Measure customer support agents’ sales KPIs
Upselling and cross-selling products isn’t a typical customer service task – but when it becomes one, the return can be massive. With the help of an ecommerce focused helpdesk, you can track all sales made through different channels and attribute them to your support agents. You can incentivize your support team in the same ways you might incentivize your sales team, with bonuses, commissions, or days off when they bring sales to the company.
Click here if you want to learn more about how you can turn your helpdesk into a profit centre.
