The unsung hero of your ecommerce business: Your customer service team

Every business wants loyal, happy customers, and your customer service team has a direct role in their loyalty. Salesforce reported that 91% of customers said that good customer service makes them more likely to purchase. And 80% of surveyors mark brand experience as crucial as the products they're buying.

Your customer service team should be ready for anything that comes their way without breaking into a cold sweat. They deal with influxes of orders from special sales, questions about holiday promotions, and so much more; they must be poised with resources and strategies to adapt to anything that comes their way.

What hurdles will your customer service team face?

Some requests and feedback your customer service team receives will be unique to your business. However, there are universal problems that every team will tackle regardless of feedback content. Your team will undoubtedly be familiar with issues like:

Unexpected or confusing questions
Feeling overwhelmed in a rush of feedback
Too few staff available
Lack of up-to-date or accurate information
Inability to complete a customer’s edit

Hitting any of these roadblocks is frustrating, and it’s a lot of pressure to rise to the challenge. Because even if your products resonate well with customers, stumbling through an interaction could, unfortunately, turn some people off your brand.

11 best customer service tips to improve your team’s efficiency

Customer service doesn’t have to be a challenge full of confusing questions and scrambling for extra hands. If you have everything prepped before that notification bell starts to ping, you can put your best foot forward when the questions pour in. Your customers will walk away feeling heard and appreciated, and your brand will be the first one they think of when their friends ask for recommendations.

Here are a few ways you can prep your team to provide award-winning customer service:

1. Have standard replies ready for common questions

You'll notice common questions always arise in customer service. If you can, go through your logs to find the most commonly asked questions and craft quick replies for your service agents to copy and paste. This is where you can put your brands' own flair into your responses. To cover more ground, you can even supply your answers in an FAQ document to ease the load on your support team. Some common reasons for customer support include:

A customer's order is lost or delayed
A customer is unsatisfied with their purchase
A customer's order arrives damaged

2. Find your store's rush hours

This will help you determine when you need to have heavy scheduled support hours and where you can relax. Use web traffic analytics like Google Analytics or Shopify's admin analytics. Once you know when your store gets hit the hardest, you can tailor your customer support around that rush so customers can always get a fast response.

3. Evaluate the human power you need to get you through big events

If you're starting small, you can get away with a simple strategy for determining how many customer service people to hire. If your current person/people doing the job are overwhelmed, hire more.

If you have a bigger team, you'll want to consider hiring a support manager, a representative(s) to handle general inquiries, and a specialist(s) to handle specialized or tiered topics. Make sure you have enough people to cover different support channels like email, phone, chat, and social media while also covering your high-traffic time zones.

PRO-TIP: Pay attention to your customer growth and account for that. A good formula for determining how much help you need is to see whether the Total Support Reps Needed = Total Monthly Tickets / (Tickets/Reps/Month).

4. Determine the hours you'll be available and in what language(s)

Find out your store's rush hour through web traffic analytics. You'll also be able to see where your customers are coming from. If your business is primarily English, but your customers are coming from a country that speaks a different language, you may want to consider hiring support people for those customers. It's all part of making a memorable experience that will keep your customers coming back.

5. Source chatbots for frequently asked questions

Chatbots are an essential member of any customer support team. They're always available, you can customize them to your brand, and they can fill the gap by answering frequently asked questions when your support is on break. Customers are thrilled when they can get an immediate response to their questions.

Take a look at one of these chatbots to add to your team:

6. Make sure your documentation is up to date

Documentation is one of the most important customer service tools, and an FAQ is just the starting point. Detailed documentation about your products, from kitchen knives to fragrance diffusers, reduces the workload on your team and helps them know the product even better. What kind of steel do you source for your knives? Are the fragrances safe for my newborn baby? All things you can answer with documentation that your support team can use to send out in response to queries. Documentation is especially needed if you sell a technical product. You should be describing:

What problems do your products solve for users
How users can access your product
How to use the product with guides, troubleshooting and how-tos
Resources like templates and case studies
Where customers can get support when they're stuck

PRO-TIP: If you're stuck for time or need a skilled pro to create your website content, check out the Shopify Experts marketplace to get the docs done for you.

7. What channels will you use to offer customer service?

You've probably heard it before: be where your customers are. Your loyal paying customers shouldn't have to go to great lengths to get in touch with you, and being available on more channels will ensure your customers are finding you. Every online business should think about being on the following channels:

Email
Social media
Telephone
Chat
Forums
Support widgets on your popular pages displaying FAQs and documentation

PRO-TIP: If you're struggling to figure out a good multichannel support strategy, the solution is simple: ask your customers. Reducing their effort is one of the main reasons your customers will keep buying from you.

8. Are you set up to edit orders when customers change their minds?

Customers change their minds all the time. Maybe they need their item in a different size or color, or their shipping address has changed. Flexibility with these types of support questions is sure to WOW your customers. When running an online store, Shopify offers great basic order-editing features right in the admin. You're able to add/remove items from orders, issue refunds, and change shipping and email addresses. If you need more advanced order editing in Shopify, Edit Order by Cleverific is an essential tool to add to your customer support arsenal. You'll save time and money by being able to quickly edit your customer's complex orders without breaking a sweat. Consider running an audit of commonly performed edits in your store. If you find that you're only accommodating the shortcomings of your current software, switch to Edit Order for advanced editing like:

Switch shipping speeds for your customers
Easy exchanges and refunds no matter the order age
Add discounts and change line item prices
Edit tax percentage per line item
Change customer contact info like shipping, email, billing address, and customer account
Take complex phone orders with customized line item properties
Advanced edits on orders like adjusting the quantity, add a line item property, and editing/deleting an existing line item property
Advanced search of orders via SKU and barcode

In the end, your ability to offer flexible support with order editing will develop those repeat customers your business needs.

9. Plan your promos and make sure your team knows how to handle them

Promotions are an important part of skyrocketing your sales, but they can be a pain to plan and implement. One of the ways you can speed things up is with automation. If you’re a Shopify Plus merchant, check out how to set up quick and easy promotions using Edit Order + Shopify Flow. Once your automated workflows have been implemented, you won’t have to worry about spending time training your team or making errors.

When setting up promotions, over-communicate with your team so they're prepared to help your customers.

10. Modify your return policy when you’re expecting high traffic

For big events, some problems will always be out of your control. In these moments, your return policy will make or break a customer's decision to buy. Things like shipping problems or delays due to inventory or shipping partners can come up, so having a solid return policy that benefits your customers will build trust and keep your customers coming back. Create clear return policies and straightforward delivery timelines. You can also minimize customer returns before they buy by:

Writing updated and detailed product descriptions
Include product measurements
Include at least four clear, professional photos of your products with an accurate display of color

11. Create a feedback loop

Bill Gates said it best: "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."

Without customer feedback, how do we know what we're doing wrong and how we can optimize to do it, right? Here at Cleverific, we take customer feedback seriously. We're a small team, so whenever we speak to our customers, we place their feedback in a dedicated Slack channel for everyone to see, from our marketing team to our dev team. If you're a larger team, you might need different tooling, but the methodology remains the same:

Ask for customer feedback
Categorize the feedback
Act on the feedback
Follow-up with customers who shared feedback

After several rounds of these steps, come up with an action plan to build your loyal customer base using the feedback you received.

Coming soon: Let customers edit their own orders

Even with these other customer service tips, sometimes the best customer service is the kind that you let your customers handle themselves. Most customers’ first course of action when they have a problem is to try to solve it on their own—and many consider it a 5-star experience when they’re given that option.

With Edit Order’s incoming new feature Customer Portal, reduce your support requests with a self-serve tool whose conditions you set yourself. Using it, allow your customers to:

Add and remove items
Change size, color, and other variants
Cancel their own orders

If you’re interested, sign up here.

So is that notification another question…or a 5-star review?

Happy customers become loyal, repeat customers and sing your praises! Part of creating a happy customer is building trust by providing outstanding customer support. Some key methods you can use to help your team give the best support they can is to over-communicate, make their life as easy as possible with automation (hello chatbots and promo automation!), point them to where your customers are, and ensure that they’re having memorable conversations.

Always give your customers the attention they need, and they'll never need to look elsewhere!

📣 Edit Order automation is coming soon for Shopify Advanced merchants. Notify me when it's available

Direct your customer service team to more resources

See how to access customer information right from your order
Get the details on how to refund and partially refund in Shopify
Watch a video tutorial on how to refund and partially refund in Edit Order

11 tips to prep your customer service team for the future