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3 essential customer support tools for the ecommerce industry

Anuj Mishra 2 Stories

Wednesday May 24, 2017 , 6 min Read

e-Commerce Industry

The ecommerce industry is growing every single year. It is a great way of running a business, as it is no longer necessary to set up a physical store to acquire sales. With the right marketing approach, reaching out to thousands of new customers is fairly easy, which allows businesses to grow quicker.

However, the competition in this line of work is quite fierce, as businesses are continuously fighting for their piece of the market. This is why it is important to think ahead and offer exactly what the competition does and even more.

As you already know, the journey of trading does not end with the sale, people expect much more nowadays. This is why businesses utilize software tools that help increase customer satisfaction. If you want to grow your business, utilizing live chat, help desk and knowledge base is a must.

Let’s take a look at how each of these customer support tools help both you and your customers.

Live chat

Popularisation of social media networks has changed the way people communicate. People now send messages to people they know a little, or they even try to introduce themselves to other people via Facebook, Twitter or all the other similar social media platforms. This habit has created expectations when it comes to communication with brands.

This is precisely why live chat software is such an effective customer support tool. By implementing it, your customers will be able to contact you at any point in time while they are browsing your store. Furthermore, the live chat software tool brings a variety of other benefits for your business:

(i) Lower costs – Cutting costs is important for every company. A live chat tool is simple and cheap to use. Additionally, a single customer support agent can help more customers, as they are in a position to simultaneously work on several problems.

(ii) Increase sales – Live chat software is not only good for customer support, it is also a good upselling mechanism that will drive a higher number of sales from your ecommerce store.

(iii) Improve customer loyalty – The fact that you are immediately there to help a customer will make him or her come back to your ecommerce store. Actively working on improving loyalty is crucial for every business, and a live chat software tool is perfect for successfully performing this task

(iv) The fastest problem solution – Your agent will instantaneously be able to help the customer. It is the fastest way to offer customer support.

(v) Staying competitive – Are you looking for a way to follow the competition and remain ahead of many others? A live chat tool will enable you to do just that. There are plenty of stores that have not yet implemented this system, take advantage of it.

As you can see, live chat software has a lot to offer. So, if you are looking for a way to offer flawless customer support to your customers, you should definitely add this tool to your arsenal.

Help desk

Help desk is a perfect software tool for businesses that have thousands of customers. Live chat is a great solution, but as the number of customers increases, utilizing a help desk will allow you to organize things better.

This software tool will enable your customers to open tickets that should be addressed. When a customer support ticket is created, it will be sent to the right customer support team member who can best solve the issue. When you scale this system to thousands of daily customer support requests, it is the single best way of solving all of them in a timely manner.

If you notice that your live chat customer support team is barely keeping up, you should seriously consider adding a help desk software. It will enable better efficiency and productivity, which will result in increased customer satisfaction.

Knowledge base

Utilizing only on one of the abovementioned tools is not going to always bring the best results. You should also add a knowledge base. It is the firewall that will directly impact the number of live chat requests and the number of tickets for your customer support team. Building a great knowledge base is necessary for every ecommerce store. It brings benefits to both the business and to the customers.

(i) Business benefits – A knowledge base can be used for building an in-house collection of data that will help you organize all of your company teams. It will allow them to work together, enabling them to better streamline a series of business processes.

For example, you can use the knowledge base to better educate the new customer support agents. The best customer support agents can add valuable information to the knowledge base to help the other colleagues pick the right approaches for achieving the best results.

Furthermore, connecting the customer support team to other company teams is also important, and a knowledge base is the right tool for the job.

(ii) Customer benefits – Creating flawless customer support the easy way is best achieved with a knowledge base. The platform will allow you to easily create FAQ and Wiki pages detailing all the important ecommerce store information.

As the internet has changed how people behave, they will most likely end up on your customer support pages before deciding to open a customer support ticket or contact the live chat customer support agent. Therefore, the knowledge base should include all the useful information a customer might need. It will reduce the stress on your help desk and live chat team.

To get the best and most effective customer support for your ecommerce business, it is best to utilize all of the three tools. Each of them comes with pros and cons, but it all comes down to letting the customer get in touch with you in the way they prefer.

The live chat and help desk can serve as a perfect fuel for the knowledge base, as all of the customer requests can be used for evaluating the most common issues. Combining the three tools will allow you to create a customer support team that will always be in a position to help a customer out, in a short period of time.

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