When customers contact an e-commerce support team, they expect a quick and effective solution to their problems. A prompt response and satisfactory solution to the query can make a difference, keeping you ahead of your competitors.
Remember, no matter how organized the business is, a Shopify store will receive customer complaints. And this is a normal scenario in this industry.
Why?
A customer purchases the product from a virtual store. They can’t see or touch it in advance, unlike in a physical store. If you don’t describe all the details on your website with necessary images, a product may disappoint the customers when they get it in their hands.
Shipping issues often arise, especially when selling tangible items. Even if there are no issues, I’ve seen many customers contact support asking where their product is and when they will receive it.
So, providing exceptional Shopify customer support is essential. This article shows how you can make your support team more effective and efficient in solving customer issues on time.
How Does After-Sales Support Affect Returns and Customer Satisfaction?
Customers expect a fast and effective solution to their problems from a retailer, especially if it’s an e-commerce store. If you fail to do that, you will end up with dissatisfied customers.
Besides, most Shopify e-commerce stores accept returns within a specific window. If you don’t respond quickly to customers with a practical solution when they contact your support team, the return rate will increase. This will kill your brand and seriously affect your Shopify business.
Now, let’s explore how a fast Shopify customer service can be beneficial in these two main areas:
Improved Customer Satisfaction
A memorable customer experience is key to customer loyalty. Fast customer service makes your customers feel important. It significantly decreases their anger and anxiety.
Moreover, if you can solve complaints effectively, your customers will have a smile on their faces by the end of the service.
I personally handled some difficult customers at the beginning of my career. Some of them were very angry at first, but when I listened to their problems attentively and offered a prompt solution, I even got positive testimonials from them. Some of them gave the brand a shout-out on social media.
So, take it from my real-life experience—if you can provide the right solution within the shortest wait time, customers get satisfied and show a positive attitude toward the brand.
Lower Returns
Customers return a product when they receive an item not as expected. But most of the time, they try to contact the customer care before returning it. If they can reach you and you can resolve their issue, the return rate decreases.
However, if the customer is not satisfied with the product and still wants to return it, streamline the return process and offer incentives. When you are ready to compensate for their loss, it creates a positive image of your brand in the customer’s mind.
Shopify Customer Support Tips & Best Practices
Creating a suitable customer support strategy for your Shopify store is crucial if you want to provide good customer support. In the past, all support had been provided by human agents. Now, with the development of AI and machine learning, you might need to blend human support with an AI chatbot and other digital tools for better output.
A Shopify customer support team gets different types of queries from its current and potential customers. The following tips and best practices will help you design your customer support strategy and respond to queries within the minimum time:
- Create Your Standard Support Workflow
- Centralize Customer Data for Multichannel Support
- Deliver Personalized Experience
- Be Authentic & Accept Your Fault
- Train Your Customer Support Team
- Prioritize Support Tickets
- Utilize AI Chatbot and Live Chat
- Have Useful FAQ Sections
- Know Your Inventory
- Collect Customer Feedback & Measure Performance
- Consider Outsourcing Your Shopify Customer Support
01. Create Your Standard Support Workflow
A disorganized and scattered workflow can hurt your customer support performance. To deal with lots of customer queries effectively, assign the support channels among team members and set a proper SOP (Standard Operating Procedure).
A standard workflow will increase your team’s productivity. Agents will be experts in their respective tasks to handle common customer queries, like product inquiry, returns, late delivery issues, and technical support regarding products and services.
You can also assign tasks based on customer issues, departments, etc. Develop your own strategy or adopt one proved to be effective for Shopify customer service.
02. Centralize Customer Data for Multichannel Support
A Sopify customer support team usually has multiple touch points to reach its customers.
For example, a store may have live chat and support email through which customers contact the agents. A phone number is also often used to directly call an agent. Besides, lots of customer enquiries come through social media messaging and website contact forms.
Complaints and queries coming through all these channels should be maintained centrally using a single dashboard. Extensive tools like Zendesk maintain all customer data and let you resolve all complaints from its dashboard.
03. Deliver Personalized Experience
When you maintain a centralized customer record, your support team will have all the information about a customer when resolving their issues. They will know:
- Customer name and contact details
- Past orders and other records
- Their subscription status
- Any tag or comment added by a team member before
Prior access to customer data lets your support agents give a personalized experience to a customer and resolve their issues faster. Personalized treatment gives a customer a memorable experience.
04. Be Authentic & Accept Your Fault
Customers like to be treated as valuable people, not like ticket numbers. So, the first rule of providing excellent customer service is addressing them as a valuable part of your business. Listen to their problem, identify the pain point, and solve the issue.
If there is a real issue with the product or service, apologize to the customer and fix it. Moreover, compensating for customer loss and/or offering a gift gives the customer a feeling that you are in serious business and that you treat your customers well.
05. Train Your Customer Support Team
A well-trained and capable support team is an asset to any business. Expert support agents can identify issues fast, provide quick and effective solutions, make the customers happy, and close tickets within a minimal wait time.
On the other hand, an inefficient agent piles up backlogs as he can’t resolve tickets quickly. Customers don’t get the expected service and leave negative reviews on different platforms.
So, invest on agent’s training. Make them sharp and capable of handling your customers.
Usually, a customer support team member should go through different types of training covering product and service details, industry insight, any specific software your team uses, communication patterns of your target audience, and more.
Design some in-house courses if you can. Also, there are hundreds of high-quality courses online specifically designed for e-commerce customer service.
06. Prioritize Support Tickets
Every customer issue does not require equal and immediate attention. So, it’s important to sort out tickets and prioritize the issues that need to be resolved first. Especially if you don’t have enough agents available to attend to all the queries, a sorting system will help your support team contact customers based on priority.
Example: You’ve got two issues to resolve:
- A product is not delivered to a customer even after the mentioned delivery window is over. The customer is angry.
- A customer is asking when an item will be back in stock.
Which one do you think should be dealt with first? Of course, the first one. If you don’t handle the customer with a prompt resolution, they might get frustrated and cancel the order.
07. Utilize AI Chatbot and Live Chat
Customers are more impatient than before. They prefer an instant solution rather than an email reply the next day. Live chat is a good option for contacting them in real time and fixing issues promptly.
Besides, an AI chatbot can assist with general queries, minimizing the pressure on human agents. A well-trained chatbot can resolve more than 50% issues without human intervention.
08. Have Useful FAQ Sections
FAQ sections in your Shopify store can answer relevant customer queries. If you cover all relevant queries in the FAQs on every page, customers won’t have to contact you except for delivery issues and after-sales services.
So, try to add FAQ sections to your store, and it will be an asset in reducing customer complaints.
09. Know Your Inventory
Every member of your support team needs to have a clear knowledge and real-time data of your Shopify inventory. Especially the members who manage live chat must know about each product so that they can assist customers without keeping them waiting.
This is also beneficial for product upselling or cross-selling.
So, train your agents and prepare an inventory management guide for them. A modern inventory management software with automated tracking and other advanced features will make it easy for your support team.
10. Collect Customer Feedback & Measure Performance
Customer feedback is a valuable asset for a brand. Positive feedback works as word-of-mouth and has a great impact on branding.
After fixing their issues, politely ask the customers to leave a comment on the service. It will also help you measure the performance of your support team members. The team will be able to evaluate the services and identify where they are good enough and where they need improvement.
11. Consider Outsourcing Your Shopify Customer Support
Building a dedicated and skilled customer support team often requires time, money, and lots of effort. This is the reason many store owners prefer outsourcing the Shopify customer service.
A well-structured store with user-friendly UI and UX, quality content, and genuine products proactively reduces customer complaints. Customer support works as a reactive team to address and fix issues. Today, you can outsource both.
Skilled virtual assistants now help with everything you need for your Shopify business. Online agencies provide pre-trained customer service agents who quickly learns the ins and outs of your business and start clearing tickets effectively.
How to Improve Shopify Customer Support With Live Chat?
According to Shopify data, businesses that respond to customers within five minutes are more likely to gain their trust and generate more sales. Live chat is a great way to communicate with customers in real-time.
Live chat can assist customers not only when they face an issue but also through all the stages of their buying cycle. That means a customer can contact an agent for instant support before making a purchase decision, during the purchase (for help with variants, payment, etc.), during the delivery, and after receiving the product.
Why is live chat preferred by both store owners and customers?
Email replies generally keep the customers waiting for some time. Phone calls are the quickest way of communication, but supporting customers through phone calls requires a large team. Besides, when all your agents are engaged, callers must wait until an agent becomes available.
With live chat, a skilled agent often can serve multiple customers simultaneously. Additionally, a well-trained chatbot is capable of handling general queries and keeping customers engaged until a human agent takes over.
Let me point out the benefits of using live chat for Shopify customer support:
Benefits of Live Chat
- Immediate response & real-time communication: Live chat ensures a quick response to customers that increases customer satisfaction. Instant messaging resolves issues quickly and requires less time.
- Better user experience: Customers get prompt resolution to their problems while browsing the store, ending up with a better experience.
- More engagement: Using live chat, a customer can engage with a support agent throughout the whole purchase process. This increases conversions.
- Cost-effective 24/7 service: A chatbot integrated with live chat can solve basic queries, freeing up agents to look into more complicated issues. This ensures maximum results with a limited number of agents. Moreover, a chatbot assists your customers around the clock.
- Building trust and loyalty: Instant personalized support increases customer confidence and loyalty.
Tools That Help With Shopify Customer Support Efficiency
Shopify customer support becomes much easier with the right tools. Most of the modern customer support tools use centralized data that helps an agent get all the information in one place and provide a personalized experience to the customers.
Explore the tools below and choose the right one based on your team size and need:
Shopify Inbox
Shopify Inbox is Shopify’s built-in messaging application that can be installed from the Shopify App Store. It covers all your support channels like website chat, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram messages.
So, you don’t need to switch between different apps. Besides, this app has some AI functionalities to make tasks easier for the agents.
Price: Free of cost (comes with a Shopify account)
Zendesk
Zendesk is the most used third-party customer service management platform right now, which manages emails, live chats, phone calls, social media, and more from a single dashboard. You can integrate Zendesk directly with your Shopify store.
Price: Plans start from $19 per agent/month
Zoho
Zoho Desk is a cost-effective multichannel customer support application trusted by top brands worldwide. It is designed for faster issue resolution, customer retention, and overall customer happiness.
The AI chatbot developed by Zoho, called Zia Agents, helps the team across all the support channels.
Price: The basic plan starts at $7 per user/month
Conclusion
The customer support team is one of the core teams managing a Shopify store that keeps the customers happy. Although many small and medium-sized stores outsource the service from a third-party agency rather than building a team from scratch, never neglect the role of a support agent if you want your store to grow and have loyal customers.
If you have an in-house team, train them regularly with updated applications. Also, they should have access to all the inventory data and product information. Monitor and evaluate each team member’s performance and set a customer support strategy to cover all your support channels.
FAQs
01. Can I hire someone to manage my Shopify store?
Answer: Yes, you can. There are many agencies now providing skilled virtual assistants to manage your Shopify store. They help you manage your business, from creating a Shopify account to product listing to customer support.
02. How can live chat improve customer service?
Answer: Instant messaging via live chat provides real-time solutions to customer issues. Customers can contact an agent while browsing your store and get answers without waiting.
Live chat also increases agent productivity and service quality. One agent can handle multiple customers in rush hours, as he does not need to engage in a one-to-one session like a phone call.
When you integrate a well-trained chatbot with the live chat, that makes it even more effective and efficient. A chatbot is capable of handling general queries, while a human agent can look into more difficult issues.
03. How to be a good live chat agent?
Answer: Live chat agents need to be sharper and smarter as they provide instant support, unlike replying to emails. They should respond to customer queries as soon as possible, especially when a chatbot can’t handle it.
A centralized data system is the key to providing prompt services through live chat. All product information, including inventory, product variants, usage, substitutes, and relevant items, should be available to the live chat agent.
Sometimes, a live chat agent may need to handle multiple customers simultaneously; however, do not keep them waiting for your replies.
04. How do you handle angry customers?
Answer: Customers get angry sometimes. Not always because of genuine reasons, but also because of misunderstanding regarding the product, delivery, or other issues.
As a Shopify store representative, you need to handle angry customers very politely. Listen to them carefully and identify the painpoint. If the fault is from your end, apologize to the customer and resolve the issue. Offer compensation for the customer loss.
If the customer misunderstood something, help him with the right information. Do not forget to mention how sorry you are to hear that the customer is in trouble. Take it from my own experience—you can convert an angry customer to a loyal one with the right approach and appropriate treatment.
