Chapter 7
What’s the Difference? Customer Service and Customer Experience
IN THIS CHAPTER
Connecting with your customers
Measuring customer service and customer experience
Optimizing customer experience
Customer service (sometimes referred to as CS) forms part of your online store’s overall customer experience (or CX). Customer service relates specifically to the way in which a business communicates with its customers, particularly when an enquiry or issue needs to be resolved, while customer experience relates to every interaction a customer has with a business. The overarching goal of an ecommerce business is to continuously strive to improve its customer experience as this leads to the acquisition and retention of customers.
By the end of this chapter, you’ll have a good understanding of the different channels of communication that Shopify allows you to add to your store, and how to add them. You’ll also discover how to set up customer service metrics (otherwise known as key performance indicators, or KPIs) to help you optimize the quality of the service that you’re offering your customers, and use customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys to help you better understand your customers’ feelings about the service you provide them with.
You also consider how to offer your customers a more personal service using customer service software (CSS). In an ideal world, when a customer contacts you with a query, you want to know as much about that customer as possible so that you can help them find exactly what they’re looking for.
Customer Service 101: Communicating with Customers
Customer service can be broken down into two parts of the customer journey: pre-purchase and post-purchase. The way to build a strong customer service position pre-purchase is to makes sure that your site is clear on frequent issues that arise when running an online business, such as your shipping and returns policies. With thoughtful planning, you can stop an influx of customer service enquiries about things that can be answered through clear online store policies.
Post-purchase, customers may reach out to you to track an order or query a delivery, to initiate a return, or to ask for more information about how to use the product they have purchased.
Regardless of what part of the purchase journey a customer or visitor to your site is on, providing clear, timely and accurate information to customers is essential when it comes to running a successful ecommerce store. In the following sections, I look at effective ways to communicate essential information to your customers to minimize confusion, as well as some customer service channels you can use to connect with customers about their purchases.
Creating clear policies and product information
You can achieve a few easy customer service wins to help reduce customer service enquiries when you’re setting up your website. Consider
- Providing clear return and shipping policies that you are prepared to uphold.
- Adding pages with frequently asked questions (FAQs) and information about your business to your online store.
- Updating your customers about new products using an email newsletter.
- Giving your customers a place to tell you (and others) what they think of your products and customer service.
- Offering multiple channels for your customer to contact you.
- Providing sufficient product information on your product pages. Turn to Chapter 4 for more on creating pages that offer this kind of information for your customers.
Good clear policies and up-to-date customer information can deflect needless customer service queries, which in turn saves you the time (and money) involved with replying to them.
Some of the most important things your store’s webpages need to cover include:
- Answering repeat questions: You can create a page for FAQs to answer any questions that your customers frequently ask, such as questions about shipping, returns and refunds. FAQs provide a self-help knowledge base for customers, which hopefully aids in their decision-making process and reduces the amount of contact a customer needs to make with the store.
- Telling your story: Create an About Us page that tells the customer who you are and what your store or brand aims to achieve. Consider using a video here to provide some authenticity around your brand, which helps to build trust.
- Informing your customers about your products: Many of your pre-purchase customer service enquiries will be from customers asking for more information or further clarity on certain products you’re selling, so it’s important not to get lazy with product descriptions. One of the most common product questions I’ve seen is customers asking what the dimensions of a product are, so remember to provide that sort of detail when you’re creating and describing your products.
- Clarifying your shipping information: Shipping information should be clearly available on a Shipping Policy page in your store. You need to show the time it takes for you to deliver to certain areas, and the price. Be as specific as possible, but don’t go on and on — a clear table is a good way to display your shipping policy. You also want to tell customers how they can track their orders on your Shipping Policy page, as well as on your FAQ page.
- Explaining your returns and refunds policies: Not only will customers email you if they’re unhappy or unclear about your returns policy, they may leave public reviews. If there’s one thing that really grinds the gears of an online shopper it’s a poor returns experience. Choose a policy that is both competitive and financially responsible for your business, and make it very simple and clear to understand. Don’t hide this crucial detail, particularly if you have a good policy — it can help you acquire and retain customers.
Displaying clearly how to contact you: Add a Contact page to your footer menu so customers know how to reach you. Be sure to display all your contact details, and your typical response times, including your standard business hours.
You can offer customers different ways to contact you (see the next section for more on these), but one useful addition to your site may be a contact form, which you can add after the rest of your contact details on your Contact page.
To create a Contact page and add a contact form to the page, follow these steps:
- From your Shopify admin, go to Online Store → Pages.
Click on Add Page.
A new page appears, with some text boxes for you to complete.
- In the Title text box, type a title for your contact page, such as Contact Us or Get in Touch.
In the Content text box, type any text that you want to appear above the contact form.
If you only want to include a contact form, you can leave this section blank. However, you may want to add some welcoming text and a reassuring note, such as ‘We will get back to you as soon as we can!’Other useful information you may like to add includes:
- Your store’s address (if you have a retail location)
- Your store’s phone number (if you want customers to be able to reach you by phone)
In the Theme Template section to the right of the page, choose Contact from the Template Suffix drop-down menu.
Choosing this means you use the Contact page template from your selected theme.
Check the Contact page of your selected theme to see what you can expect this to look like.- Click on the green Save button in the bottom-right corner to save your new Contact page.
Customer service channels to consider
You can communicate with your customers in numerous ways, whether it be face to face, through direct channels like phone and live chat, or by providing clear information on your website — the more the merrier. The goal is to make it easy for the customer to get a resolution to any queries they have as quickly as possible.
The following sections cover some of the customer service channels you can add to your Shopify store.
Also known as a support ticket, email is still the most common form of customer contact in ecommerce. Your customer service email is likely to be something like [email protected], [email protected] or [email protected] — and you can clearly display that on your Contact Us page (the link to which is typically displayed in the footer of your homepage).
When a customer emails you, you don’t really want to be accessing your Outlook or Gmail but connecting your email to a CSS, or customer service software.
A CSS is a platform that connects all your customer service channels, such as emails, chats and social media messages, into one platform, so you can view and reply to all your messages from the same place.
I’ve used various CSS platforms over the years, but my favorite one to use with Shopify is Gorgias, mainly for its ease of use and the fact that it integrates with your Shopify store in minutes. Once a customer reaches out to you, Gorgias imports that email, chat, phone call or social media message into its platform, and brings up any associated order information for that customer so you can quickly check or amend their order details, track their shipment or refund their order — all without leaving Gorgias.
CSS platforms give you far more options than your normal email inbox, including being able to tag emails, or support tickets, into categories automatically, such as ‘Shipping’, ‘Complaint’, ‘Product Enquiry’ and ‘Order Tracking’ — which is useful intel to help you understand where your customers tend to have issues with your website or business in general.
A CSS also provides you with an easy-to-use inbox that shows you your emails, from oldest to newest — from here, you can check if anyone has responded to the email, or assign it to a team member.
Because your CSS integrates your live chat function (see the next section), your social media channels and phone channels so that all points of contact are brought into one platform. if you find that Cranky Johnny has messaged you across three different channels you can merge his communications into one support ticket, with all the issues pulled into one thread, which saves you time (and energy!) when responding to customers.
Live chat
Definitely my favorite customer service channel, live chat is when a customer is able to open a chat box and chat directly to customer service representatives, rather than having to send an email and wait for a reply. Live chat is a fast two-way conversation with an online store.
In my experience, 15–20 per cent of all customers that use live chat go on to make a sale. That conversion rate is worth a second, and third, look. Sure, some of those customers may just be checking a price, or asking a basic question, but many of them are sold by the service the agent gives quickly via live chat.
Fifty per cent of online customers bounce and most sessions only last a few minutes — and people are not always patient enough to wait for an emailed reply. Shopping can be an impulsive activity, so you need to strike while the iron is hot, and live chat is a great weapon of choice!
I’d go as far as saying that live chat is an expectation now for most customers, so I recommend you get it on your site as soon as you can. Remember, though, that if your live chat option is always offline, it might look a little unprofessional, so make sure you download the live chat app and start jumping online whenever you can (I like Gorgias live chat).
As your business grows, and if you have a customer service team (rather than just you doing every role!), consider placing your live chat operators next to your product team in the office as they can feed back information on the products. For example, they pass on useful information such as ‘I have a customer here who says their bag doesn’t fit the 13-inch laptop’, or ask questions such as ‘Does anyone know if the red gumboots come in a size 12?’ This sort of talk gets both teams involved but also passively teaches other team members about your products, and any related pain points for your customers. Answering customer queries then becomes all about teamwork.
Chatbots
Chatbots are a type of software that can provide automated responses that appear as though they’re from a company customer service agent. Chatbots typically ask the visitor a series of questions aimed at guiding the customer through a bunch of pre-existing answers from an internal knowledge base. Chatbots can appear on live chat and Facebook Messenger — and really any channel that offers two-way chat between a company and a customer.
Bots can be segmented to talk to different customer groups in different ways, for example segmenting customers by those that shop sale items versus those that shop full-price items. They tend to start with a leading question, such as ‘What brings you here today?’ Next, they propose several answers, such as ‘Shipping query’, or ‘Looking to buy a product’. Depending on which response the customer clicks on, routing rules kick in to show various options, such as ‘Great, are you looking for black shoes or white shoes?’ The bots can actually act as sales assistants, or gather leads to be followed up.
Chatbots such as Intercom can be integrated into your Shopify store through third-party apps that are found in the Shopify App Store. Given they operate as bots and not actual people, they don’t need breaks and can work 24/7 for you across multiple languages. Chatbots are a great way to serve your customers, as they increase your response times greatly.
Putting up too many layers of artificially generated responses can be a real turn-off — you have to know when to let C-3PO hand over to Derek from Customer Service.
You may not need chatbots during the early stages of your ecommerce career, but it’s useful to familiarize yourself with them as your business develops. If it’s just you when you’re starting out, a robotic friend may be exactly what you need.
Phone
I love the good old telephone, and I think too many online stores hide their phone number — as if they’re scared to actually talk to their customers. I say embrace the humble phone — get your customers on the line, even the grumpy ones! I often advise companies who want to go to the next level with their customer service (who actually want to be customer-focused, rather than just have it in their mantra in a pretty font) to call rather than email a customer when they see a testy message come through their CSS platform. Most of the time, a friendly phone call (with a friendly resolution) can turn that customer around. I can guarantee you they won’t be expecting your call, and many customers apologize for the tone of the message they sent!
One of the main pain points an online retailer faces is the lack of personalization. The phone gives you the opportunity to talk to, relate to and empathize with your customers.
Most online stores’ phone systems are powered by VOIP (voice over IP, or ‘internet protocol’ if you want to get really technical) and can be integrated with a good CSS platform, where the calls are converted to support tickets, which gives you good, clear reporting on that channel. You may consider getting a professional number (as opposed to a typical household phone number), but I have seen no evidence of this having any impact on customer service or sales.
Social Media, SMS and WhatsApp
Depending on your target demographic, you may get a lot of customer service enquiries through social media platforms, especially through Instagram and your Facebook ads (chapters 16 and 17 cover Instagram and Facebook marketing in more detail). A good CSS system will integrate with the big social media channels and pull the messages in, creating support tickets out of them, so you won’t need to scan each of your channels for messages.
Many CSS platforms seem to struggle with picking up comments on Facebook ads, so it’s worth asking your potential provider about how this works to check the CSS is fit for purpose.
Social media messages have to be treated as a priority because they’re public facing, so you can be sure other people, and potential customers, are watching. Be on your best behavior and don’t respond with an attitude to Cranky Johnny — instead, give him your best virtual smile and make it clear to all readers that you’re ready to help (and make sure you respond quickly). It can be very easy for social media users to pile onto a brand, so you need to make sure you’re watching your social media messages with an eagle eye.
Three different messaging channels to watch out for include:
- Facebook Messenger is a beast of its own. Using this channel is a no-brainer for your store. It integrates easily into Shopify, or most CSS platforms; it’s free; and it’s got some great capabilities. Assuming you, like the rest of the ecommerce world, are going to use Facebook as a marketing channel, then you can expect your customers to chat on Facebook Messenger with you.
Facebook Messenger is easy for the customer to use, and your message history sits there waiting for your next connection (in case the user drops off, and comes back online later). You can set up chatbots in Messenger, and as a bonus, you can push marketing information through Messenger as well. Even if you don’t add one of the big CSS platforms like Gorgias to your store right away, Shopify allows you to integrate with Facebook Messenger via Shopify Inbox, so you can allow customers to chat to you using Facebook Messenger while they’re on your website (see the next section for more on Shopify Inbox, which also has its own chat feature in case you want to add live chat to your store).
SMS (which stands for short message service) is a platform that isn’t widely used for customer service, and I wouldn’t say it’s a must-have, but I do like it to communicate with customers on things like items coming back into stock or shipping notifications. SMS is supported through third-party applications in Shopify, but they’re mostly geared towards marketing communications rather than customer service.
Before you send SMS messages, make sure you have the consent of the recipient.WhatsApp is less popular, but I wouldn’t discount it as it dominates messaging apps globally like no other platform. It makes sense that with so many users of the platform, the service might eventually trickle into a form of customer service that users may want to be contacted on.
You may have trouble integrating WhatsApp with your CSS, although it would be on the roadmap of most of them. You can, however, integrate it into your Shopify store directly through third-party apps such as WhatsApp Chat + Abandoned Cart by Pushdaddy.com.
You’re unlikely to need SMS and WhatsApp in your early days of selling online with Shopify.
Shopify Inbox
Shopify Inbox creates a single mailbox for all your online customer interactions. It allows you to manage your customer conversations, customize the chat appearance on your online store, create automatic responses and view conversation analytics from your Shopify admin.
Using Shopify Inbox means you can easily add live chat to your online store — more easily that integrating a third-party CSS platform — allowing customers to message you while they shop. You can also receive Inbox messages from customers using other messaging channels like Facebook Messenger. Shopify Inbox lets you view and respond to these messages from your desktop and mobile device.
Shopify Inbox is a good option for beginners due to its ease to install, and the fact that it’s free.
You can also use Shopify Inbox to send text or images to your team members who have a staff login for your Shopify store.
The good news is that Shopify Inbox can be set up directly from your Shopify admin. Visit shopify.com/inbox to get started, or to find out more. Shopify Inbox can be downloaded on iOS and Android mobile devices.
In Figure 7-1, you can see some of the customer service insights that Shopify Inbox provides you with, such as first response times, which is one of the most important KPIs in customer service. It indicates how long it takes, on average, for you to reply to a customer’s first enquiry. A good benchmark to aim for is one hour.
Source: Shopify
FIGURE 7-1: Shopify Inbox.
Using Customer Service Metrics
Customer service performance can be measured using key performance indicators (KPIs), which are an important way to track how happy your customers are. Shopify Inbox offers some of these important metrics, such as first response time, which helps you keep on top of the quality of your customer service.
Here are the typical customer service KPIs that relate to all customer service channels:
First response time: First response times are a key metric for any customer service team, regardless of the channel that’s being used, and they indicate the amount of time taken to respond to a support ticket (any email/chat/call/social media message in your CSS). A good KPI here is no more than one hour for email and social messages, and one minute for live chat. This is not a usual KPI for phones, which should be answered within 30 seconds of ringing, although most CSS platforms don’t show this metric for phone calls.
You can set this KPI in some CSS platforms to only include business hours, unless you are running 24-hour customer service.Resolution time: This is the time it takes to resolve a ticket in total, from the time it is opened to the time it is closed. You can expect your live chat resolution time to be around 10 minutes, whereas your email resolution time might be around 4–5 hours to allow for some back and forth.
Try to avoid resolutions going into the next day.One touch tickets: Reported as a percentage, this is a ratio of the number of tickets completed with one response; that is, ‘one touch’. Over 50 per cent is good here — the goal is not to be fast at all costs and hurry the customer along, but to answer the customer’s question with one great reply so they don’t need to ask you anything else.
It can be so annoying to get a reply after a few hours, only to find the customer service agent has forgotten to answer one of your questions or they still need to check something for you. Go and check it now, and get back to the customer quickly!- Tickets created versus tickets closed: This metric helps you check you’re closing (completing) as many support tickets as you’re receiving, which essentially means you’re keeping on top of your customer service.
I suggest running customer service KPIs from day one because they’re an easy, cheap way to start to improve your business.
Maximizing Customer Experience
Customer experience, or CX, is the sum of all parts, if you like. It’s the overall feeling the customer experiences when they browse, shop, interact with or finish shopping on your store. It’s the customer’s everything!
Good customer experience in ecommerce leaves the customer feeling positive about your brand or business, and everything associated with it.
User experience (or UX) deals with how the user (the visitor to your site) interacts with the website. User experience is about the interaction with the website, whereas customer experience is about the customer’s interaction with all parts of the business. Chapter 9 explores the user experience in more detail.
Customer experience is holistic — there are many cogs in the wheel, and some of those rely on third parties, like couriers, so as a retailer you need to try and own the experience as much as you can. Check out the nearby sidebar ‘Falling short of a great experience’ for an example of how pivotal customer experience can be to long-term sales success.
Customer service and customer experience go hand in hand in building a successful and sustainable online store. It’s cheaper to retain a customer than it is to acquire a customer, and one of the key factors in whether or not a customer will come back to you is how you treat them when they need something from you.
The following sections explore why it’s so important to prioritize customer experience — and how you can measure customer experience to help you strive for better outcomes as your business evolves.
Providing an excellent customer experience
Customer experience is everything. Without the customer, you’re going to find it hard to make a living, so put the customer at the center of everything you do. You’ll have noticed by now that I keep recommending you do things that your customer would want, not necessarily that you would want, although they don’t always have to be mutually exclusive. The point is to gear your operation around the customer.
The goal is to gain your customer’s loyalty by giving them an exceptional experience across all their interactions with your business. A key metric in your business will be customer lifetime value (CLTV), which is driven by the predicted value of the future relationship with your customer. I talk about how to calculate and measure CLTV in Chapter 8.
Measuring customer experience
You often read articles about different ways to measure customer experience, and people will talk about this survey or those reviews, but the best way I’ve seen to benchmark your customer experience is a good old Net Promoter Score (NPS). If you want to take your customer experience seriously, and really benchmark yourself against your industry, and strive to improve, then NPS is the way to do it.
The NPS is an all-encompassing scoring system used to assess how customers feel about their overall experience shopping with a store. It’s a universal ecommerce metric that is generally sent to customers via a survey, which asks them to score their overall satisfaction in their dealings with a business out of 10. Respondents are divided into three groups: promoters, passives and detractors. Promoters are customers that score the business a 9 or a 10 rating; passives are customers who score the business a 7 or 8; and detractors score the business between 0 and 6.
A detractor isn’t a large piece of machinery used on a farm; instead, it’s someone who wouldn’t recommend your online business (as opposed to a promoter, who would, or a passive, who is satisfied with your business but isn’t someone who would recommend your business to a friend). Your NPS is the percentage of customers that would recommend your business to a friend or another person.
The NPS score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters:
NPS = Percentage of Promoters – Percentage of Detractors
Imagine you’ve collected 150 responses to your NPS question, and the scores look like this:
- 80 customers gave either a 9 or 10 rating
- 30 customers gave either a 7 or 8 rating
- 40 customers gave between a 0 to 6 rating
This means you have 80 promoters, 30 passives and 40 detractors. To calculate the percentage of promoters and the percentage of detractors:
Percentage of Promoters or Detractors = (Number of Promoters or Detractors / Number of Respondents) × 100
To calculate the percentage of promoters:
(80/150) × 100 = 53% Promoters
To calculate the percentage of detractors:
(40/150) × 100 = 27% Detractors
Subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promotors give you the Net Promoter Score:
53 – 27 = 26
An NPS of 26 isn’t particularly high, but results can vary widely between businesses. The highest NPS score I have seen is 85, whereas typically a score in the 60s and 70s is considered good.
The general question asked in an NPS survey is: ‘How likely are you to recommend (your business) to a friend?’ So essentially, an NPS survey is measuring the loyalty of your customers. NPS is considered to be the benchmark in overall satisfaction with a business, in ecommerce.
NPS cuts through the noise, post-purchase, and simply asks your customers, ‘How likely are you to recommend us to a friend?’ Which takes us back to our friend Mary (see the nearby sidebar ‘Falling short of a great experience’), who ultimately decided she couldn’t wholeheartedly recommend the business — which makes her a detractor.
In the early days, you can use NPS to gauge how your customers feel about your business, and as you get more staff you can strive to increase your NPS through improving your customer service and user experience, as well as looking into where you might be falling down. Down the track, you might have a data team that can pull the data on where your detractors’ scores have let you down (for example, do customers who select same day delivery have a lower NPS than those that select economy delivery?), and you would then dive into trying to rectify the issue.
In the absence of a data team, I suggest you reach out to detractors to find out what they didn’t like — you’ll often find you win the respect of the customer and discover how to improve, and a good online business should strive for continuous improvement.
Checking Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys are a customer service metric used to score a customer’s satisfaction levels when speaking with a customer service agent. I tend to use the NPS to score a company overall (refer to the preceding section), but I use CSAT to score the level of support that the company has provided to its customers.
Customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT) won’t generally be an out-of-the-box report in your CSS analytics or insights, but a CSS worth its salt will offer it for you. CSAT results are gauged from surveys sent to their customers, usually from the CSS or other platforms, which asks the customer to rate their interaction with the business, or the customer service, providing you with a score out of 100.
To assess a customer’s satisfaction with their service, you can create a question on a CSAT survey that asks: ‘On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied were you with your experience with our customer service representative?’ Be sure to call out the customer service agent, not the business (and not the product) because you have other ways of scoring those facets of the business, such as the NPS. Remember, the CSAT metric is designed to specifically measure the quality of the customer service your team gives.
CSAT scores are presented as ratios, or percentages, and are calculated by taking all the customer service agents’ scores out of 10 and dividing them by all the maximum possible scores. A good CSAT is over 90 per cent.
Imagine you send out 10 surveys, with each being scored out of 10. The maximum score is 100. To calculate your CSAT, you tally all your actual scores. If you end up with 80 out of 100, you can take 80 and divide it by 100, and then multiply it by 100 to get a percentage — so in this case, your CSAT is 80 per cent.
CSAT is one of the best training tools for customer service teams. CSAT systems tend to show a leaderboard of customer service agents, from highest to lowest, and serve as a great rewards program for high-achieving customer service agents, as well as a way to help train customer service agents who may be scoring poorly. You can filter through your low-ranking CSAT tickets, and train up on how the customer service agent might have handled that better next time.