Recently, I came across a thread on a leading ecommerce Facebook group, Shopify Entrepreneurs, which asked its 100,000 members a simple question:
“What do you think is the biggest challenge for e-commerce owners who earn more than $ 10,000 per month? “
If you’re like me and thought the majority of the answers would involve difficulty with PPC, increasing sales, and expanding their business, then you might be surprised by what I found.
There is something that we ecommerce entrepreneurs grapple with more than Google and Facebook ad marketing and optimization.
So what’s the biggest challenge for store owners who earn over $ 10,000 per month?
The short answer: eCommerce customer service!
As your revenue grows, so will the number of your customers and the need for robust customer service strategies and systems to ensure you can handle the increased volume without compromising service.
And how do you prepare for customer service success?
Here are some of the best ecommerce customer service suggestions from successful store owners with over $ 120,000 in annual revenue.
Plan, implement and optimize your macros and knowledge bases
The first thing successful online store owners suggest to beat this # 1 ecommerce struggle is to plan, implement, and optimize your macros and knowledge bases. This means preparing your store’s knowledge bases in advance and developing and optimizing them as your business and customer base grows.
The perfect knowledge base strategy will save you or your customer support team a lot of time and effort while making it easier for customers to get their questions answered without having to wait to reach you. by email, chat or phone. Ultimately, streamline your customer service systems, take the pressure off your support team, and improve the customer experience.
Here are some tips for building a sufficient knowledge base.
1. Make it easy to find and navigate
What good are high-value resource pages and knowledge articles if your customers can’t find them? Therefore, the first thing you want to make sure is that your knowledge base is not only easy to find, but also easy to navigate.
You can do this by linking your knowledge base to your support or help menu buttons. Here’s an example of articlebubba, with drop-down options linking to their FAQs, support pages, knowledgebase topics, and downloadable PDFs of the product manual.
Another way to make it easier to find topics is to make your knowledge base or FAQs searchable, as Norfolk Greenhouses has done.
2. Highlight the most popular topics first.
Another way to make your knowledge base more user-friendly is to prioritize the most popular topics. By making sure your best articles are front and center, you are helping the majority of your researchers find hot topics immediately with minimal effort.
3. Highlight related content
Another way to keep your knowledge base content effective is to include related topics in each article. This can be easily done if you use a good CRM tool like Zendesk.
4. Prioritize the most important help topics first and create a template.
You want to make sure that your knowledge base includes as much useful content as possible. However, if you are starting your business, you may run out of time and budget. But that doesn’t mean you should postpone this task until you hit the 6-figure income bar. Start today with the most important help topics – the ones you or your support team discuss the most. Then regularly expand your articles to make your knowledge base as comprehensive and inclusive as possible.
A great way to streamline this process is to create a help page article template, making it easier to write new articles. This will also ensure consistency in your help articles. Here is the bare minimum that your article templates should include:
* A clear overview of the problem the page will solve
* Step by step guide to solve this problem
* Topics related to articles consulted by researchers
5. Collect feedback and optimize accordingly
You don’t just want to keep a close eye on the articles that customers view the most when they visit your customer support pages; you should also receive feedback.
These comments will help you correct and optimize the help articles, improving the overall effectiveness of your knowledge base. This is another thing which is much easier to implement if you are using a full support system like Zendesk or HelpScout.
6. Incorporate visuals
Another way to make your knowledge base more efficient is to integrate visuals. This can take the form of product or topic images, content videos, or category blocks.
Invest in a CRM solution for e-commerce customer service
The next thing successful online sellers recommend to tackle this # 1 ecommerce struggle is to invest in a good ecommerce CRM tool. Having the right tool to help you execute the right strategies when you have a lot of sales (and customers) and growing with your business is essential to developing a strong customer service strategy from day one.
A good ecommerce CRM tool should make it easy and efficient for you to track and manage customer data, streamline your support systems to save time and money, and ensure that your service is top-notch.
Here are the best CRMs for ecommerce to consider:
- Gorgias
- Selling power
- To acquire
- Zoho
- HubSpot CRM
- Metrilo
- Click on
- Office
- Help Center (for help pages)
- EasySlide (for help pages)
- POWr FAQ (for help pages)
Outsource your e-commerce customer service
The third and final suggestion for a growing business that wants to counter this major struggle for ecommerce sellers is to outsource your customer service to handle all your customer communication for you.
At some point, you need to recognize that you can’t do everything with your current infrastructure and team. Why? Because as your sales increase, your customers will also increase; which means you need to increase your problem management skills. The best way to do this is to outsource your customer service.
There are two main ways to do this outside of in-house employment: either by outsourcing your growing customer service tasks to freelancers, or by outsourcing your online store’s customer support completely to a third party service. . Let’s discuss the two.
1. Independent customer support service for e-commerce
The need for independent customer service representatives for e-commerce is growing dramatically, which means it is increasingly easier to find freelancers for support staff. You can find these freelancers on all of the top freelance sites such as Upwork, Freelancer, and Outsource. For tips on how to find the right freelance writer for your business, check out our step-by-step guide to finding a freelance writer.
2. Third-party customer support services
Alternatively, you can outsource your e-commerce customer service to a third party and free up time to focus on other aspects that are important to your business success. Here are some of the top reasons why you would seriously consider outsourcing your customer service:
- The need for multilingual support representatives
- Increase support capabilities while keeping your team light
- More time to focus on product development and marketing
- Be able to offer 24 hour assistance
- Saving time and money = cost reduction measures
Here are some services to consider:
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There you have it, the answer to what is the biggest struggle for online store owners and how you can plan ahead to counter it on your way to 6-figure success. We all know how important ecommerce customer service is to sales. Therefore, staying ahead of the curve when the number of customers increases will help you achieve peak performance more easily.
To learn about the other top issues and how to overcome them, check out our Ecommerce Challenges Case Study now!
Have questions? Post them in the comments below.
