Want to create a great e-commerce customer experience this coming year? Focus on three simple pillars of excellence for your CX organization. In this article, we discuss each pillar and provide a few easily implemented ideas to improve on each this coming year.

1. Convenience

2. Customer Support Speed

3. Customer Support Quality

Deliver convenience for your e-commerce customer to create loyalty

Delivering convenience for your e-commerce customer is a surefire way to build your brand, generate customer loyalty, and increase profitability. To put it simply, every aspect of the customer journey should be easy and convenient for your customer.

Enhancing the customer experience (CX) from the moment they arrive on your website, all the way to receiving their order, and interacting with your support team is key. Make it quick, stress-free, and pleasurable for customers along every step of their journey. Examples include ensuring easy navigation through your site, providing customer-friendly payment options, making customer support accessible via any customer-preferred channel, maintaining fast customer support responses, and ensuring customer support quality. Keep in mind that customer service shouldn't be a one-time opportunity but an ongoing reward for your customers, so strive to make convenience the cornerstone of all that you do.

Many of the CX choices made on your website such as organizing the product catalog, checkout process, and payment options will be enabled by the e-commerce platform you choose (e.g. Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce, etc. etc.). Outlining the customer journey in writing can help you pick which platform is best for your business and how it should be configured.

Other CX convenience initiatives such as when and how to enable live chat, when to use chatbots, and what support channels to enable can also require some serious thought and planning. One of the most important CX improvements you can make this year is to simply open up one or two additional communication channels for your customers. By adding one or two new channels per year, and executing on those channels extremely well, your e-commerce brand will be well on its way to providing truly effective omnichannel customer support, which is the gold standard in CX excellence.

Omnichannel customer support is becoming increasingly popular in today's e-commerce and retail market, as it provides a seamless experience for customers that cuts across multiple platforms and channels.

Whether it be via phone, email, chat, online forums, or social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, customers can use whatever medium is most convenient for them. Additionally, if a customer does need more complex help than what can be provided through one platform alone, they can switch to another without having to start all over again. As an example in its simplest form, imagine a customer commenting about their struggles with your product on Facebook and you move the communication over to a detailed email or a quick phone call for speedy resolution.

By adding just one or two new communication channels this year, you can offer a more personalized experience and, often times, gather valuable data about your audiences at the same time. With this approach, you can ensure that no matter where or how customers reach out for help, they will receive fast, friendly, convenient assistance every time.

All that said, how do you measure the effectiveness of your efforts to boost customer convenience? Enter the Customer Effort Score (CES).

Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric used to evaluate the amount of effort required by customers to obtain your desired outcome. It is usually measured on a scale from very low, low, average, high, very high and reflects how much effort was required for them to complete their task or purchase product/service. CES takes into account the customer’s experience through the entire process – from initial contact through completion. The goal is to identify areas that require more effort for customers in order to reduce friction and increase satisfaction levels. Additionally, understanding customer effort reduces the cost of servicing customers and increases loyalty with improved customer experiences.

Here is further reading on how to implement customer effort scores in your organization, as well as how CES fits into broader CX balanced scorecard metrics. Feel free to download our CX Balanced Scorecard Template for your own use as well.

Improve your speed of customer service to ensure a great customer experience

One surefire way to delight customers and provide a great experience is through speedy responses - the simple act of responding quickly to customers’ inquiries and needs. This not only includes quick replies but also proactive outreach when issues arise. For example, an easy win is to reach out to customers proactively when a weather delay impacts their shipment.

Companies that prioritize speed in the customer service process win because, from the customer’s perspective, there's nothing more satisfying than having concerns addressed quickly. We're all familiar with the positive feeling of a quick resolution to our needs and this leads to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty for e-commerce businesses. All companies should strive for fast responses; it's not only good customer service practice but also essential for providing a great CX in today's competitive landscape.

Here are five tips to help speed up your customer support responses:

1. Analyze common customer inquiries: Take time to analyze the types of questions customers ask the most frequently and be prepared with answers for those common queries. Post those answers in your FAQs and consider leveraging a chatbot on your website that will allow customers to self-service immediately.

2. Establish a tier-based support system: A tier-based system can help prioritize requests based on severity and/or urgency, allowing the team to tackle urgent issues first, thereby increasing aggregate customer satisfaction.

3. Automate processes: Utilize automated systems such as CRM or help desk software to for email, phone, and chat management, topic tracking, and CX performance reporting. Another great automation is to leverage proactive outreach when shipments are stuck in transit or other common issues pop up with customers' orders.

4. Utilize self-service options: Along the lines of point #1 above, give customers access to self-service tools like FAQs, video tutorials, well-designed chatbots, and other resources so they can find answers quickly without having to wait for a response from your team.

5. Train & empower employees: Ensure that your staff is properly trained and capable of handling customer inquiries in a timely manner. Additionally, give them the authority they need to make decisions independently when necessary or appropriate. The use of Customer Service Quality Management Tools can help guide your agents appropriately and ensure they are servicing customers appropriately ongoing. More on this below.

By implementing these strategies into your customer service process, you can ensure faster response times for your customers and higher satisfaction levels overall!

Enable high-quality customer support via great technology and effective agents

To ensure customers receive high quality support, it is important to invest in the technology that enables customer service agents to work effectively, as well as investing in the agents themselves.

In terms of technology, implementing agent quality assurance (QA) software is generally a great place to start. Customer service QA software is designed to help businesses deliver superior customer service and maintain high standards of agent performance. QA software will provide you with a simple, systematic way to monitor the overall performance of your customer service team, monitor specific individual agents, identify areas for improvement, and measure the success of your agent training and CX enhancements.

Put simply, with customer service QA software in place, you can ensure your customers are receiving the best possible experience from your customer service team.

While QA software will help you identify where CS agents may need help, a Learning Management System and regular ongoing training (https://www.rushorder.cx/cx-agent-training) can help build agents' knowledge and confidence. CS agents need to be experts on your business and products, approachable, and friendly to ensure customers feel heard and valued.

At Rush Order, we typically focus our agent training sessions on three key areas:

1. Team building: Your CS agents are the face of your brand and an integral part of your team. There are myriad of ways in which we structure a welcoming, fun, high-morale environment. A happy team is absolutely necessary to creating happy customers.

2. Empathy: Yes, this is another "soft skill", but helping your CS agents put themselves in your customers' shoes is critical to actually helping customers. As an example, the practical implications of this begin with the "unboxing experience". Following the same steps as a customer, agents should unbox the product, acquaint themselves with the quick start guide, go through the setup process, and actually use the product. This process evokes questions in agents' minds and helps them to better understand the customer experience they are facilitating.

3. Continuous learning: When developing a training program, consider the overall goals of your brand and organization and how those goals should be reflected in the training delivered. For example, you'll need to make decisions about the trade offs between optimizing for the customer experience versus maximizing efficiency or profitability. Trainings should include both classroom-style instruction as well as hands-on practice with real customer scenarios. Ongoing access to text, photo, and video based information to reinforce lessons is also critical. We recommend tools like CloudApp and Loom, as a couple examples of effective multimedia tools. In any event, perfection will come from practice and repetition. The faster you can push agents through those repetitions, the sooner they will become productive customer experience enablers.

Combining great tech with effective CS agents is a winning combination for delivering a top-notch customer experience.

By making incremental improvements in the three areas we’ve described – convenience, speed, and quality – you can create a strong e-commerce loyalty strategy that will keep your customers coming back for more.

And remember, if you need help getting started or would like more tips on how to improve customer experience, subscribe to our newsletter or contact us today.