Table of Contents
Introduction
In the past few years, we have witnessed the rise in adoption of mobile in almost every aspect our lives, lifestyle, a way of interaction, how we access information, the way we conduct our business etc. and e-commerce is no exception. There is a lot of buzz about how to manage and improve the customer experience, in the customer service industry. In fact, a survey by Gartner found that about 89% of the businesses plan to compete primarily on the basis of their customer experience.
Customer interactions are occurring on mobile devices on an unprecedented scale. Many consumers decide whether they will engage in business with a company based on the quality of its mobile CX. A mobile customer experience with easily accessible features, resources and information made available with minimal customer effort improves the customer loyalty and retention levels. In order to reach out to customers who are seeking support on mobile and provide a high-quality customer experience, companies need to adopt a “mobile first” strategy. This means, everything that a customer needs to do, be it learning about a new product, receiving customer support, or chat with an employee, can be done on a mobile device with no reduction in customer experience.
Ways in which E-commerce Organizations can Improve Customer Service
Customer Experience on Mobiles
Poor customer experience and navigational difficulty is the foremost concern. Before crafting a mobile device strategy, companies must decide whether they want to create a responsive mobile website, which could be just a mobile version of a desktop website, or design an application specifically for the mobile user. Many websites are designed to display on desktop and laptop screens. If a website is not mobile responsive, its content is not displayed correctly on the smaller mobile screens, resulting in a poor user experience. For example, the pictures and text may not be properly displayed, page elements may be incorrectly scaled and navigation buttons may be hard to find and click. The second most common challenge is when customers use the company’s website’s internal search on a mobile device, and the search tool displays irrelevant results.
Most consumers just give up in order to avoid the sheer inconvenience of sorting through lots of results on a mobile device. This is a poor customer experience which frustrates customers and forces them to call the company, write an e-mail, or even take their business elsewhere. A company needs to reappraise its online database of articles, FAQs and support documents with improvements in knowledge management in order to overcome this problem. Businesses also use virtual agent software which is essentially a more sophisticated search engine. It uses natural language processing and a whole list of questions to understand the customer’s exact query and provide the best answer.
Multiple Mobile Channel Engagement
To really connect with mobile consumers, companies must engage them through multiple mobile channels. People use mobile devices for a variety of activities such as text messages, browsing through social media, internet-based chat platforms, surfing the internet etc. A research by Haywire, an SMS platform for businesses, found that 67% of business professionals have used SMS for business communications. Engagement through text messages, Twitter and other platforms may not be effective for every business model, but are examples of how businesses can become more mobile-friendly.
Customer Support Software
A centralized helpdesk can go a long way in improving customer satisfaction when managing customer support through email. This can facilitate the connection of social media accounts and also integrating live chat support. This enables you to maintain a transparent record of all customer interactions and allow you to reply faster to your customer queries.
Social Customer Service
In order to effectively target the millennial customer, it is necessary to resort to promotions and communications on social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. E-commerce businesses can engage with their customers by creating and developing strategies using these free platforms. An advantage of this is that it allows you to address customer issues or inquiries faster than the traditional customer calling support or ticket submission. This will help in achieving better e-commerce customer experience and improve customer loyalty and revenue at lower costs.
Personalized Transaction Emails
Transaction emails are follow-up emails that companies send after every transaction.Instead of using the traditional, but obsolete tones, customize your emails as if addressing a friend. An informal way of communicating with your customers which uses a fresher, more upbeat tone are often appreciated as they speak of personal feelings, which customers can easily relate to. Some of the factors that must be considered when developing a mobile customer experience are:
- Type of mobile interactions: Businesses must understand their customers’ mobile preferences and what kind of information they expect from an app. This can vary based on the type of the app and its functionality. This will help companies design clean and minimalist user interfaces.
- Personalized customer interactions: Mobile customer experience is a key component of the companies’ omnichannel strategy.
Companies can exploit the opportunities that mobile customer service provides; for example, determining a customer’s location from his/her phone’s GPS, which can be critical in an interaction. They can also offer coupons and special offers exclusively to mobile shoppers based on their shopping history and habits. How can e-commerce companies benefit from using an effective CRM system?
E-commerce companies stand to benefit a lot by using a CRM system which provides a whole range of integration capabilities and which can help upgrade their support system and make their business fully mobile. Kapture CRM allows customers to send instant chat messages against their orders through your own mobile app. It provides instant support and helps increase your order booking chances by 20%. Customer data is automatically updated in the database to reflect the latest information. Kapture CRM also automatically distributes incoming service requests to your support executives based on any predefined rules like source wise, product wise, priority wise etc. This allows you to view only those requests relevant to your team
In addition, there is also a live dashboard that displays a segregated view of customer requests of various types like complaints, exchange requests, order issues, delivery issues or any other category. Mobile support will see continued improvement of self-service and help desk resources and tools. This is a win-win situation for organizations as well as customers because of lower costs of providing service and the ever-increasing preference of customers for mobile platforms compared to other service channels. Live chat, another popular support channel which has immense scope for improvement and better mobile compatibility. And finally, in the future, we are likely to see more customization of mobile support to individual customers, which is where a lot of untapped value of an online support channel will be found.