It’s much more difficult for online stores to ensure their customers have a great experience because, chances are, those businesses will never meet their customers face to face. So how do you WOW your customers when shopping on your online store? In this article we’ll give you some tips on improving your customer’s experience.
The great news is that you can improve every facet of your business from the moment customers get in touch to the moment they receive their order.
Implement an email helpdesk or service desk
Ever missed a customer’s email, forgot to get back to them or couldn’t find their email in your usual inbox? How do you think that made those customers feel?
Well, that’s where helpdesks come in. An email helpdesk lets you respond to your customer enquiries from one central place. It creates a support ticket for each email that comes in and gives you various options such as assigning the ticket to someone in your team, adding internal notes to the ticket and even updating the status of the ticket along its journey. It’s an email system, to-do list, customer communication tool and team management system all in one. Some helpdesks even let you manage tweets, facebook posts and live chat conversations all from within the helpdesk environment. You can also set up an FAQ knowledge base in your helpdesk based on the questions you get asked most often.
Having a helpdesk for your business means you can manage your customer communication much better and helps ensure your customers have a good experience from the moment they reach out to you. Here are some examples of helpdesks that integrate into Shopify:
- Enchant
- Zendesk
- Help Scout
Improve your Shopify Notification Emails
Every time someone places an order on your Shopify store they will get an automated email generated by Shopify, confirming details of their order. The good news is you can edit those templates to look awesome and address a ton of potential questions right from within your confirmation emails.
Using free tools like Klaviyo Email Template Editor you can design your own custom email templates and Klaviyo will convert it into HTML code which you can simply copy and paste right into your Shopify email notification to change the entire look and feel of the emails that go to your customers. Make sure to use well thought out language in your emails that relates to your business and branding styles, this will help your customers feel more valued for buying from your store.
Shop on your own store
You will lose customers if you do not shop on your store. Go to your store as a shopper and run through the process of buying something, even to the point of shipping the product to your door. You will get a firsthand idea of what your customers go through when they shop and you’ll immediately understand how you can improve the experience. If customers can’t easily find what they are looking for, don’t understand enough about your products or cant get in touch, chances are you will lose them. The same thing could happen when a customer places an order but gets frustrated with the shipping process or the packaging isn’t up to scratch or the service around shipping isn’t really worth it. Very few customers will stick around if they’ve had a bad experience with your business processes. Know your processes in detail by shopping on your store and strive to constantly improve them.
Packaging and Delivery
Many online stores tend to forget about the customer experience once the parcel leaves or when the order is picked and packed. The irony however, is that this is the most important step.
Understanding how your customers receive their parcels will enable you to implement steps to ensure that this process is seamless. Also, if your customers have a fantastic unpacking experience it’s an opportunity for you to claim that great feeling as yours and will make your business name more memorable. The better a customer feels the more likely they are to talk about your business and buy from you again.
Customer follow up
Being a small business you have the opportunity to follow up with your customers to find out more about what they think. Send them an email or, even better, give the occasional customer a call to see what they liked and what they didn’t like about shopping on your store. This will become invaluable in understanding where the pain points are for your customers.
In conclusion, your customer experience can only be improved when you understand what your customers go through on your store. Put your customer first in every decision you make and you will start reaping the rewards.
