How to Keep eCommerce Customers Happy During the Holidays

The holidays are a critical time to satisfy your customers through exceptional customer service. As people begin to do their holiday shopping, they’re looking for the best brands to provide them with the perfect experience.

To ensure your eCommerce business has the chance to stand out among the many competitors vying for attention this holiday season, you need to develop a solid customer service strategy. Here we’ll explore the different ways you can optimize customer service to boost conversions and sales before, during, and after the holidays.

Use a Reliable Analytics Tool to Measure Performance

To gauge the performance of your customer service strategy, you’ll need the right tools to help measure results. Without the appropriate solution, you’ll be unable to gain the insight you need to determine what’s working and what isn’t.

One invaluable asset to have on your side is Google Analytics, which is free to use and easy to pick up. You can use this and other analytics tools to measure traffic, session duration, and other metrics that help you identify strengths and weaknesses along the sales funnel.

Listen to Your Customers and Show That You Value Their Input

Throughout the holidays, you may encounter customers who are unhappy with your products or service and have certain issues that need resolving. If you experience this at any point, it’s important to be understanding of your customers and their needs.

Take the time to understand what issues your customers are experiencing and work to correct them. For example, a customer may become frustrated with a delay in delivery for a certain product, in which case you should notify the customer of the delay and the reason for it and consider compensating the customer with a discount or freebie to use toward their next purchase.

Be communicative and make it easy for customers to reach out to you as needed, which will indicate that you truly care about keeping them happy.

Provide Live Chat Support

One of the best ways to facilitate effective communication with your customers is to implement a live chat feature on your website. If you can, have someone manage chat and answer any customer inquiries or handle requests.

You don’t have to limit your live chat support to your website, either. On your social media channels, enable customers to reach out to you through private messages and keep track of them.

If live chat is simply too challenging to manage regularly, consider using chatbots to either supplement or replace this feature. Chatbots will be able to answer basic questions in many cases.

Engage with Followers on Social Media

During the holiday season, people are also more likely to connect with brands on social media, often to share their experiences when going down their holiday shopping lists.

Keep an eye out for engagement on your social channels and see what people are saying. People may be writing public posts about your brand, or they may leave comments on your posts.

If people are leaving comments relaying their experience, provide thoughtful responses that further show you value people’s input. You can also consider people’s publicly disclosed experiences to optimize your customer experience and get better results.

Prepare Your Customer Support Team

If you have people managing live chat and general customer support, make sure your team is equipped to handle any situation that might arise.

For relatively new brands, it may be more difficult to manage an influx of many customer requests, but you can supplement in-person efforts with chatbots, drip emails, and other automated tools that help with this.

Make sure your customer support team has the tools and training needed to keep your customers happy, and you’ll be able to satisfy customers more easily over the course of the holidays.

Offer Self-Service Options

Customers may not immediately reach out to a company if they can find answers to their questions and solutions to their problems on their own. This could not only make it even easier for customers to find the information they need, but it could also free up some of your customer support team’s time to focus on more pressing issues.

You can create a resource on your website that answers some frequently asked questions. An FAQ page can go a long way in helping customers figure out what they need to do or what may cause delays or other issues.

If you’re not sure what questions your customers are asking or likely to ask, you can look to numerous resources. Check out social media conversations and see what kinds of questions people ask in comments on your posts. Look to personal requests that people submitted via email or chat. Dive into analytical data to see what question keywords people search for on Google.

Streamline the Customer Journey

Using analytical data, you can see where people are dropping off and failing to make a purchase. Find out what bottlenecks are keeping people from moving along the customer journey and take the necessary steps to optimize it.

For example, if people are landing on a specific product page but quickly leave it without completing a purchase, you may want to optimize that page. This could entail writing a richer product description, including more appealing visuals, changing prices if possible, or ensuring the source that led visitors to that page accurately advertises the product.

Over time, you’ll be able to shorten the length of time it takes to lead people from initial engagement to a purchase and repeat sales.

Satisfy Your Customers with a Strong Holiday Strategy

As you go into the holiday season, you must ensure your customers are happy with their experience engaging with your brand and making purchases. If the customer experience suffers in any way, it could limit your revenue and put you behind your competitors. The right holiday strategy will help you avoid this issue and keep customers satisfied throughout their journey.

To discover more ways to grow your eCommerce business and drive sales throughout the year, including the holidays and beyond, reach out to the professionals at Gray Growth Logistics.