As technology continues to take over more of our lives each and every day, face-to-face interaction is fading into the background. Social media and instant messaging’s dominance in our lives means we’re spending significantly less time looking each other in the eye.
In business, face-to-face communication has always been an integral part of making sales, building relationships and providing the best possible customer service. So, how do you maintain exceptional customer service levels in an increasingly online world?
If you’re a business owner, here are four ways you can adjust your e-commerce offering to ensure continued customer satisfaction.
Enhance Your Web Offering
Whether your website is the main retail outlet for your business or not, you should have it fully optimised to provide the best customer experience:
- Boost your navigation: This means tailoring your product search options (search bar, specific filters and general filters) to suit a full range of customers. From those ready to buy to those just casually browsing, you want all visitors to be able to access your full product line.
- Make the checkout process hassle free: Customers want an uncomplicated buying process, so present an array of payment options, a constantly visible cart and clear prices on shipping to keep thing simple.
- Analyse and restructure your layout: Don’t lose custom by having a sloppily laid out interface. Most users are gone in 15 seconds if they haven’t seen what they want.
Get Mobile Friendly
For a few years now, webpage visits from mobile devices have comfortably beaten out those from desktops. In 2017, 63% of all visits were from mobiles against 37% from desktop, a ratio which has no doubt grown further apart in the last couple of years.
Your website offering may look great on desktop, but if it doesn’t translate well to mobile users then you face disillusioning two thirds of your visitors. Ensuring your web page is optimised for mobile use is an essential of modern business to promote customer happiness in a buy-now culture.
Understand Your Callers
Of course, not everything is done online, and your business may run an extensive phone operation, in which case you’ll want to invest in call handling technology.
Call tracking software is a growing part of market attribution, with businesses utilising the technology to understand where their calls are coming from in order to better tailor future marketing campaigns to drive traffic to their brand.
Using the granular data that call tracking provides, businesses are able to enhance customer experience through their campaigns, whilst improving their marketing spend, performance and ROI.
The Rise of the Chatbots
If you’ve ever visited a webpage and immediately been greeted by a friendly message in a chat box in the corner of your screen, then you’ll have encountered chatbots.
Chatbots are computer programmes that can interact with visitors to a website, simulating a human-style service with a host of benefits to the business using the software.
Chatbots save time on interactions, cut salary costs and offer a 24/7 solution for your customers. They also remove the risk of human error, not to mention they’re always in a good mood and fully efficient, no matter the situation.
Should a visitor have any queries, a chatbot will immediately answer them and put them in the direction of the product or service best suited to them. With no wait times and service with an artificial smile, chatbots represent a wise investment for businesses looking to boost both their efficiency and profits.
As time goes on, businesses will continue to focus increasingly on their e-commerce offering. And if you’re a business owner, it’s important you don’t get left behind in a world where the online experience is the new gold standard for good customer service.