Did you know that one of the biggest factors in customer loyalty is your customer service response time? According toHubSpot research,90% of customers rate an "immediate" customer support response as important or very important, and 60% consider "immediate" to be under 10 minutes.

Finding ways to keep your response times short ensures that your customers keep returning to your store for their purchases, and helps to secure those coveted reviews and brand referrals.

Three ways to deliver faster customer service

Provide easy access to the tools your customers need for assistance, or to make changes
Display data where your customer service team can see it
Empower customers with self-service options

While these strategies are relevant for all customer service teams, this article will focus on how you can improve in the ecommerce industry—and specifically, for online Shopify stores.

Common challenges your customer service team might be facing (and how to overcome them)

Customer service teams run into countless obstacles on their mission to deliver high-quality answers and support. Some broader challenges include how to meet customer expectations, how to handle seemingly unreasonable demands, how to hire the right people for the job…But lets dig into more specific roadblocks, for example, making changes when a customer has an issue with their order.

While making shipping changes on an order, how many extra steps will it take? If your team is searching for a customer’s order history, how long will it take to find it? If they’re overloaded with small order edits, how will they have time to focus on more important requests?

According toStatista, 12% of American customers choose “lack of speed” as their biggest customer service complaint.In ecommerce, long response times can be remedied when your team can:

Edit orders more efficiently
Find customer data more quickly
Deal with request overload and customer frustrations

If these three obstacles are on your team’s mind, you can use Cleverific Order Editor to earn back valuable minutes you could spend elsewhere.

How can Order Editor cut down or eliminate your response time?

1. Additional quick editing options

When you’re receiving an overwhelming number of support requests per day, it can be difficult to work around edits that Shopify’s editor doesn’t support. In Order Editor, you get access toa wider variety of order edits than the ones available in Shopify.

Need an example? Let’s say your customer service team receives a message from a customer who needs their package shipped quickly, so they ask for an upgrade to expedited shipping. In Shopify, you would need to create a new order, open the original order separately, copy all the information over, and then scroll down to the shipping section to adjust the customer’s shipping rate. However,in Order Editor, you only need to open the app, scroll down to the shipping rate, and choose the new rate from the dropdown menu. See more about how order editing works in Order Editorhere.

Some other edits that you can implement just as quickly include:

Add discounts to existing line items
Modify line item pricing
Change billing and shipping addresses
And more

Not needing to create new orders to make additional edits will shave minutes off of each customer service request. And the more familiar your team becomes with this process, the faster they’ll become.

2. Accessible data about your customers

Notify Visitorsstates that 64% of all customers expect customized interaction based on previous engagements. Even if you have all the customer data you need, you’ll have to be able to access it quickly and reference it during your conversations (or offers!) to customers.

Let’s say your customer service team has just gotten a message from a longtime customer, and you’ve made a mistake. It’s taking a while to fix the error and the customer is frustrated. If you wanted to look up a customer’s total spend in order to offer them a personalized show of thanks for their patience, you would need to open a separate tab of their profile in Shopify or your CRM software. However,in Order Editor, you can use Customer Insights to see total spend and other customer data directly on the customer’s order.

Personalization is an effective way to make your customers feel heard and valued, especially after you’ve made a mistake. You can’t afford to spend extra minutes finding previous orders, notes, or other information to inform personalized interactions.

3. Proactive support with customer self-service

Regardless of how prompt your customer service team is, most customers would still rather do it themselves. According to theHarvard Business Review,81% of customers try to solve problems on their own before reaching out to customer support,andMicrosoftstates that a whopping 90% of customers expect brands to have a customer self-service portal already.

Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. If you wanted to add an extra item to your order, the first thing you would do is check your account to see if there was any way to make that change yourself. You’d only turn to customer service after you weresurethere were no other options, and by that point, you’d already be a little annoyed that there weren’t any.

Now, as a merchant, you canensure that your customers have order editing access using custom conditions that you set. Customer Portal can allow your customers to:

Add products
Remove products
Change variants
Cancel orders
And access any future edits

All of this just means that your customers will solve their problems before ever reaching out to a representative. This keeps them happier, since it reduces their effort level to make changes, and keeps your team more relaxed and able to focus on their priorities.

Faster customer service means increased customer loyalty

Even if your customer service team delivers accurate and helpful support, they can often feel rushed or limited in the process. If they’re running into too many roadblocks during every workday, it won’t take long before your customers start to notice. If you’re looking for how to increase customer loyalty with better service, the key is to aim for speed and cut down your response times so you meet (and exceed!) expectations.