How to Improve Customer Experience in eCommerce by Enhancing Customer Support

We at SupportYourApp have been offering customer support outsourcing services for long enough to know just how much the support quality impacts business success.

Almost 90% of buyers admit that they’re willing to pay more for a better customer experience — and customer support is a massive part of the overall customer experience.

That’s certainly a good enough reason to explore how to improve customer experience in eCommerce by first enhancing customer support.

Why Customer Experience Should Matter to Business Owners

Customer experience isn’t a meaningless buzzword, definitely not when it comes to customer support.

Customer support is often the first — and sometimes the only — direct interaction your customers have with your business. A single conversation with your support employee can shape their entire perception of your brand and turn them into a loyal customer or someone who will leave a bad Reddit review for all your future potential customers to find.

So, let’s take a look at why business owners would care about how to improve customer service in eCommerce:

• Direct impact on sales: Helpful and quick support can turn hesitant shoppers into buyers and prevent them from abandoning their carts.
• Building trust and loyalty: When people know they can rely on your support, they’re more likely to stick with you and recommend your brand.
• Reducing negative feedback: Solving problems before they escalate keeps unhappy customers from leaving bad reviews.
• Improving operational efficiency: A well-run support system resolves issues quickly, which saves time and resources that can be spent on other business functions.
• Strengthening brand reputation. Consistently providing top-notch support shows that you care about your customers. It can solidify your position in the market despite competition.

How to Improve Customer Service in eCommerce: 7 Key Strategies

1. Understand Your Customer’s Journey

To improve customer service, you first need to know what your customers are going through when they interact with your business. Every customer touchpoint — from hearing your brand and doing the research to making a purchase and seeking post-sale support — shapes their overall perception of your service. By mapping customer experience ways, you can identify areas for improvement.

What does this imply, though? The process of dissecting your customers’ experience involves two main steps:

1. First, map the customer journey. Start by mapping up everything an average customer does before they buy your product or service. This includes every interaction — whether they’re scrolling through your website, adding items to their cart, or contacting your customer support.

The tools that can help with this process are customer journey mapping software, customer surveys, and website analytics. Use those to track user behavior and identify where customers may face friction. For example, heat maps can show where users are clicking (or not clicking) and, therefore, reveal potential bottlenecks in your website navigation.

2. Next, identify the pain points. Those are the moments when your customers might feel frustration or confusion. In eCommerce, pain points typically include slow response times from customer support, confusing return policies, or complicated checkout processes.

For example, if customers frequently abandon their carts before completing a purchase, this could be a sign that your checkout process is too complicated. Similarly, if you notice repeated complaints about unclear return policies, this suggests that you might want to work on clear communication.

By mapping the customer journey and proactively identifying potential pain points, you get a chance to fix any issues before they become big enough to actually interfere with your business performance.

2. Provide Omnichannel Support

Some businesses have a customer base that’s very specific demographics-wise. For example, if it’s mostly young Gen Z people, you know that texting is the communication method you need to focus on the most; calls are just a backup plan.

However, that’s not the case for most businesses. If you know that your customer base is quite diverse, it’s important to do everything to accommodate the needs of everyone who’d like to shop with you. Among other things, this implies having omnichannel customer support.

Omnichannel support is more than just multiple means of communication. The thing is, the customer experience is often fragmented. A customer might begin their journey by browsing your website on a desktop, continue shopping on their phone, and eventually place an order through a mobile app. If the customer service experience isn’t consistent across these platforms, we can guarantee they won’t like it.

So, in addition to offering multiple communication channels (phone calls answering, email support, live chat, 24/7 AI-driven chatbots, social media support, you name it), focus on ensuring smooth communication among all of them. A customer shouldn’t have to retell their issue multiple times to different agents just because they want to switch from one communication method to another.

3. Personalize the Customer Experience

Today’s customers expect businesses to remember their preferences, anticipate their needs, and offer tailored solutions. This is no longer an “extra”; it’s what the overwhelming majority of customers expect regardless of the industry (except for when it comes to essentials akin to groceries, perhaps).

To be able to deliver a personalized customer experience, the number one thing businesses have to do is leverage customer data. Every interaction a customer has with your brand — whether they’re browsing specific products, leaving items in their cart, or frequently contacting support — gives you valuable information that can help you understand their needs and preferences.

Use this data to offer personalized recommendations. For example, if a customer frequently buys skincare products, why not suggest similar items or offer exclusive deals on their favorite brands? This level of personalization is quite basic, but it already makes the customer feel valued and seen.

Also, personalization must extend to customer service interactions. When a customer contacts your support team, acknowledge their history with your brand. A simple touch (such as greeting them by name and referencing their previous purchases) can go a long way in building trust and loyalty.

More importantly, though, businesses that actively use customers’ purchase histories in support interactions tend to be more efficient and have a lower resolution time on average.

4. Improve Response Times

Response time matters for customer support across industries, but it’s particularly crucial in eCommerce. Customers don’t want to wait hours, let alone days, for a response to their inquiries. Slow response times are guaranteed to cause frustration, abandoned carts, or even negative reviews.

According to 2023 market research by SuperOffice, the average customer support response time is 12 hours and 10 minutes, but customers expect responses within just one hour. As you can see, at this point, reality has a long way to go until it meets customers’ expectations.

However, even if you can’t achieve perfect response times just yet, there are still ways to prevent slower resolutions from jeopardizing your customers’ overall purchasing experience.

One of the first things you can do is to be upfront about how long they should expect to wait for a response. Even just an automated email confirmation or a message in your live chat widget setting clear expectations helps manage customer frustrations.

For example, an automatic email reply that says, “We’ve received your inquiry and will get back to you within 24 hours,” reassures the customer that their request is being handled.

When properly customized and fine-tuned, automation tools can do wonders for response times. We always encourage our clients to use automation and heavily rely on it ourselves when developing their overall customer support strategy.

5. Continuously Train Your Support Team

A well-trained support team is the backbone of your entire customer support strategy. Tools matter, but it’s your people (or the people you outsource) who will make the real difference in customer interactions.

The number one thing essential for building and maintaining an outstanding customer support team is continuous learning. Customer service best practices are constantly evolving, so your training shouldn’t be a one-time event. Workshops, webinars, and regular feedback sessions keep a team up-to-date and efficient.

An effective and relatively low-cost way to encourage non-stop learning on your team is a solid knowledge base. Think of it as an internal wiki where support agents can quickly access information on common issues and resolutions. It doesn’t take too much time or resources to create, but based on our experience, the results are impressive. 

6. Implement a Self-Service System

A lot of customers prefer when businesses give them the option of solving their issue on their own, without involving an agent — even more so if your business has a younger target clientele.

Once again, a good place to start is a knowledge base. In this case, it’s a well-structured and easy-to-navigate collection of resources for customers to check once they’re in need of an answer — FAQs, how-to guides, troubleshooting steps, and whatnot.

While a knowledge base isn’t too expensive or complicated to build, it needs to be done well to work. To achieve this, focus on search optimization. Organize articles by category, include a search bar, and use clear, straightforward language. Visual aids, such as screenshots or tutorial videos, can also help customers better understand the steps they need to take.

Also, make sure your self-service options are so easy to find they are basically impossible to miss. At the very least, this implies a “Help” button on every page of your website that directs customers to the knowledge base and a pop-up FAQ section in the shopping cart to preemptively address common questions about shipping, returns, or product features.

7. Offer Post-Purchase Support

Finally, please never think that your customer support’s job is over once a customer makes a purchase. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Customer service continues through the post-purchase experience. By providing excellent support after the sale, businesses solidify customer loyalty, encourage repeat purchases, and eventually turn customers into brand advocates.

The post-purchase phase is how you maintain a good relationship with your customers. If something goes wrong with an order — say, a delayed shipment, a product issue, or a misunderstanding about your return policy — how you handle that situation can make or break the customer’s overall impression of your business.

The bare minimum of a decent post-purchase support strategy includes a follow-up and a loyalty program.

Not all customers appreciate follow-ups, such as surveys, but they still work as a great source of feedback (and, therefore, data that can help your business get better). In turn, a loyalty program rewards customers for repeat purchases or referrals, which encourages them to return and helps strengthen customer relationships with the brand.

An Afterword

If you’re looking to improve your customers’ experience with your business, optimizing your customer support is a great starting point. It has a direct effect on your sales, customer loyalty, operational efficiency, and brand reputation.

Enhancing the customer support strategy is a long and complicated process, but we recommend prioritizing seven basic steps:

1. Make an effort to understand your customer’s journey
2. Provide omnichannel support
3. Personalize the customer experience
4. Work on improving your response times
5. Never stop training your support team
6. Add a self-service option
7. Don’t neglect post-purchase support.

Feel overwhelmed and aren’t sure where to start? We at SupportYourApp will be happy to help.

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