Customer Service is King

Are you providing your customers with satisfactory customer service? How? Is there more you can do? Don’t worry, customer service 101 is broken down in this blog post.

Customer service is keenly linked to a customer loss. A buyer is four times more likely to go to a competitor if a problem is a service-related than price- or product-related. But 70% of complaining customers will do business with you again if you resolve a complaint or issue in their favor. Also, 85% of customers are willing to pay up to 25% more to get better customer experience. In short, YOU are your customer service and YOUR GROWTH is your customer service.
Communication
Communication is a major role in customer service. It is a crucial role to help growth.It is often the speed of the communication itself that matters. 17% of consumers would recommend a brand that provides a slow but effective solution to a customer service issue, whereas 33% of consumers would recommend a brand that provides a quick but ineffective response, according to NM Incite.

This need is near universal. 83% of consumers say they consistently needed some type of support during their online shopping – 31% of them immediately, according to research from LivePerson.

Metrics
It should be clear that to be successful in the long term, and develop growth that is sustainable as opposed to problematic, an online seller needs to be heavily customer-centric.

The marketplaces themselves have mechanisms in place to ensure this. To maintain its focus on the buyer experience, Amazon monitors various performance metrics automatically, and these can be viewed in the Performance section of Seller Central. eBay has recently announced a raft of changes to their performance metrics. These new seller standards focus on what buyers care about the most – getting the item they ordered on time, and effective customer service to resolve any requests for help.

Most tellingly, a new, simplified eBay defect rate will include just two measures: seller-cancelled transactions for items that are out of stock or cannot be fulfilled for any other reason, and cases that are closed without seller resolution. A new on-time shipping metric will measure shipping performance. Again this reinforces the key element of logistics processes in ensuring customer satisfaction.

However, the main point is to ensure growth does not become problematic. An online business should make it a habit to check these metrics daily and act on any issues immediately, as declining performance metrics will impact the business.