Meeting customer’s needs is far from easy tasks. Exceeding them is a sort of art. As every business is a unique with its own specificities, its customer support should bear this in mind providing case-by-case services. The customer support cannot be the same for different industries and should vary according to business-specific needs. Thus, there is a big gap between customer service for ecommerce and SaaS startups. Which one? Let’s figure this out.
Particular aspects of the ecommerce customer service
Ecommerce is a beast that requires the tender care. The same as in the media business content is considered to be the king, in the ecommerce business “product is a king” – you have to pay it much attention.
Ecommerce focuses on new customers more than on regulars. Considering this, there are essential things the e-commerce startups should tackle:
- Pre-sales
The competence of customer support is of paramount importance on the pre-sale stage. Whether the customer will purchase your product or won’t, it depends on several factors: how the customer support team could describe the product and answer on all customer’s questions about it, how quickly and which quality of assistance receives the customer while purchasing the product.
“The customer support team have to know the product irreproachable to provide a flawless service. Even if there is no answer in FAQ, your customer service should have the answers to any questions”, says Maiia Momotok, the project lead of Wow24-7.io, the fast growing customer support outsourcing company that provides tailored solutions in customer support.
In fact, 9 out of 10 customers expect to receive a consistent experience over multiple customer contact channels. Create a call center for customers, provide an online chat and focus on timely responses. These simple things help your ecommerce startup to skyrocket.
- Lead generation
Leads processing not as easy task as it could seem. You can’t work with all leads in the same manner, you need to qualify them. To simplify your daily routine while qualifying the leads you need a script which directs your actions in each case. It is better to let the customer support outsourcing company do it in order not to waste your time.
The customer support outsourcing company will perform cold and warm calls according to your script or can devise its own script based on your requirements. After that, the processed data get into the hands of sales managers to accomplish the sale. Here is one more essential advice from Wow24-7.io team, the customer support outsourcing company that provides tailored solutions in customer support: Listen on social media as attentively as you listen to your phone. It is an important channel of leads generation. When you ignore the customer’s queries in your social media channel, the competitors can easily intercept this customer by making him a better offer.
In fact, large companies are more responsive over social media than other channels simply because of the immediacy of it. @NikeSupport is a prime example of customer service done well. They constantly respond to followers on Twitter about their products.
Particular aspects of the SaaS customer service
The main aim of SaaS startups is to get and keep as more loyal and satisfied customers, as possible. The SaaS startups focus on work with regular customers. Obviously, it takes the time to get customer loyalty. The primary thing you should provide to ensure the loyal customers base is sterling 24/7 support for your customers. Users of the SaaS are in dire need of support and very often they are trying to find help on their own. Having an online helpdesk where your customers can go to see commonly asked questions can be extremely helpful to you as the SaaS business.
So the next thing you should consider is detailed FAQ about your product. The customer support outsourcing company can help you to deal with this routine part of work. And the same time you need to provide an omnichannel for collecting all users’ feedbacks such as bug reports, feature requests, and suggestions. When a customer submits any issue he wants to track its solving. Let him do this through your customer support and you will get a strong base of satisfied and loyal customers.
“We get the customer’s report or request, then create a ticket and stream all tickets into a cluster in real-time. Bug report goes to developers to fix it. Feature request goes to the marketing team to consider it”, shares her experience Maiia Momotok, project lead of Wow24-7.io. The business owners can set the priorities, which kind of requests should be tackled first by the customer service team. As a rule, the customer support has two lines structure:
- First line support
Takes care of common requests answering basic questions. According to the international standards, the response time via e-mail is under four hours, via online chat – less than in a minute, from call center operator – not more than two minutes. To deal with this the customer support outsourcing company sets up the service level agreement with every single business owner.
- Second line support (tech support)
Handles all inquiries relating to tech issues. The technical support team has all necessary resources and knowledge to solve сomlicated cases.
As you can see, the customer service for ecommerce and SaaS startups is pretty different. Take into account these aspects while choosing your customer support outsourcing company. Make sure it has appropriate competence and experience. The flawless customer support is key to continued growth and prosperity of your startup.