No matter how well you run your ecommerce business, you can’t please everybody. The occasional customer complaint is almost inevitable for online sellers, especially if you’re selling a high volume of products.
That doesn’t mean you should treat customer complaints as unavoidable. There are several important steps to take that can stop customer complaints before they happen. Here are four of the most important.
1. Communicate Clearly With Your Customers
Miscommunication is a prime cause of customer complaints, so ensure you provide as much information as possible. This includes crucial details like prices and sizes, as well as delivery times, reviews, testimonials and your customer support hours.
Put yourself in the position of a person buying a Christmas present for a loved one. If they find the perfect product on your site and pay for it immediately, only to find out afterwards that the holiday sales have delayed shipping times, they’re likely to complain.
Clear customer communications will help you to prevent customer complaints from frustrated shoppers unable to contact you.
eCommerce sites that don’t provide enough information are creating a recipe for disaster. Apart from the initial headache of dealing with an upset buyer and a refund, they’ve added to the possibility of a negative review.
The consequences will be immediate if you receive too many negative reviews and customer complaints, as negative feedback has a damaging effect on your products’ Amazon Buy Box and eBay Best Match performance.
2. Provide Super Fast Responses!
Another important way to prevent customer complaints is by establishing clear and direct ways for your customers to contact you. In addition to listing contact details clearly on your website, you should align your support hours to your customers’ needs and provide a live chat option.
Live chat is expected by today’s online consumer and it can also help you to close more sales. For example, a customer could be interested in a product, but they have a few pre-sale queries that they need answering before they click ‘Add to Cart’.
A late reply to a query—or worse, no reply at all—will have an adverse impact on the overall customer service experience. Nothing is more frustrating to a customer than when they have a hard time reaching the person they’re trying to do business with.
3. Use an eCommerce Helpdesk!
eDesk makes life easy for online sellers who want to provide quick customer service. Features such as the ‘magic button’ enable one-click responses to customer queries and the SLA timer will prevent tickets from being left unanswered.
No matter how great your support team is, if you’re selling internationally, your customers may not be getting the help they need if your agents don’t speak their language. That’s why eDesk also has a built-in feature that auto-translates incoming messages into your preferred language so you can understand your customer’s query. Your response will then be translated into the customer’s language.
4. Set Expectations Accurately
If you can tell your customers exactly what to expect from you and follow through on those promises, you will eliminate the vast majority of customer complaints with those steps alone. Practice strict quality control of your goods and services and nobody will be able to fault your business.
Yes, this means ensuring your goods arrive in one piece, but it’s not all about the condition of your products: check that they are exactly as advertised; confirm that you are listing the correct colors and fabric of clothing, or technical specifications of electronics; make sure that your photos accurately depict what you’re selling.
Getting a new customer can be anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than a repeat purchase from an existing one, so make sure you’re providing straightforward service and that your products beat customer expectations.
Take care of these four things — clear communication, super-fast responses, the right helpdesk software and realistic expectations — and you will reap the benefits of happy customers who will keep coming back to you time and time again.
