Before getting started, a look at customer service for ecommerce is in order. The important thing to remember is that customer service means helping clients before, during, and after purchase. Some of this help is achieved through design features. AI can play a role. And, when neither of these offer customers what they need, human interaction takes over. 

Why Ecommerce Customer Service is Important

Although most people making a purchase, whether at a brick and mortar business or online, are perfectly happy to help themselves, there will be times when they need some assistance. If, at any point, the help they need isn’t available or is hard to access, opportunities will be lost. 

• If they need help before choosing a product and can’t get it, customers will not go through with the purchase. 
• If they encounter issues during a purchase, customers are likely to abandon the process unless help is at hand. 
• If there are questions or problems following a purchase, customers will not buy your products again. Their reviews and negative word-of-mouth reports will deter other people too. 

Excellent, easily-accessible service, on the other hand, has the opposite effect. By providing it, you’ll get those sales, repeat business and positive comments that encourage other people to buy your products.

Ecommerce Customer Support Channels

When choosing your channels, remember that different customers have their preferred options. The more channels you can offer, the more customers you will satisfy. Your options are:

Self Service 

Self service options are perfect for people who prefer to help themselves. However, they may not cover all eventualities. Searchable resources, FAQs and tutorials may help customers seeking information, but be sure to offer alternatives. 

Email

Some people don’t mind waiting for answers. The downside of service via email is that customers’ intent to purchase has time to cool down while they wait for replies. And, if you need to clarify their queries, there will be further service delays. Some customers would prefer more immediate service, so be sure to offer options that allow for even faster responses. 

Social Media

Some customers prefer to reach out on social media, and if you’re marketing your products there, you should expect pre-purchase enquiries as well as customer feedback across the platforms you use. Be sure to monitor all the social media platforms your business uses and respond quickly. 

Live Chat

These days, live chat is usually AI first. If you’re doing this, be sure to make it easy for customers to request live assistance. AI is great at answering routine questions, but it often struggles with more complex enquiries.

Phone Support

Customers who want answers from a human being without having to peck away at their keyboards will appreciate a phone-in option. Ensure that your agents are well-trained and empowered to deal with enquiries, and never leave your customers waiting on hold. At their best, phone interactions have strong relationship-building potential. 

Best Practices For Ecommerce Customer Service

Some of the best practices for Ecommerce customer service are pretty obvious, others less so. Here’s a comprehensive list:

• Ensure efficiency: Customers prefer transactions that run so smoothly that they aren’t left with questions or problems. Efficiency is, in itself, a form of customer service that impresses customers.
• Go omnichannel: Allow your customers to choose how they want to contact you and use software that allows you to relate customer histories to their current enquiries.
• Don’t make them wait: Regardless of the channel, customers want quick, efficient service.
• Use skilled, informed, and empowered customer service agents: First call resolution is a great target to aim for. To achieve it, agents need to know your business and its products well enough to solve problems in a way that aligns with customer expectations and your business’s internal policies.
• Be proactive: Some customers may be in need of help but won’t ask for it. Keep them informed about order progress, offer assistance, and follow up after purchase.
• Invite and respond to feedback: Invite ratings and comments. If customers aren’t entirely satisfied, get in touch, thank them for alerting you, and see how you can turn bad experiences into good ones. Customer feedback may also indicate a need for changes that will eliminate future issues. 

Customer Service: The Uncomfortable Truth 

80 percent of businesses say they offer good customer service. Only 8 percent of customers say they’re getting it. Following this up, researchers sent email enquiries to several companies. 44 percent never responded. Only 11 percent provided relevant answers. The average response time among those who replied was 15 hours. 99 percent failed to follow up. 

According to McKinsey, companies are doing a little better on social media. About 40 percent meet customer service expectations here. All the same, that means 60 percent don’t. McKinsey notes that companies who don’t respond on social media have a 15 percent higher customer churn rate overall. 

As for chatbots, The Wall Street Journal observes that most companies like them – and most customers don’t. You’ve probably had your own experiences with chatbots. Unless your query was very straightforward, we doubt you were overjoyed with the service you received. 

As for customer care lines, people have mixed experiences. While some are very happy with the help they got, others complain that agents weren’t knowledgeable enough to help them or made promises they didn’t fulfil. 

What to Do About It

Broadly speaking, there are two primary problems with customer service from a business perspective: capacity and quality. With customers expecting rapid-fire responses to their queries around the clock, few businesses have the capacity to constantly monitor and deal with communications. 

Quality issues occur when businesses rely too heavily on self-help and technology, recruit the wrong people, fail to train them adequately, or outsource to companies that offer sub-par services. 

But, for some ecommerce companies, customer service outsourcing isn’t just a buck-passing exercise. They’re willing to look for quality, and they expect results. You should do nothing less than this. 

Back Office Support From RSVP: How it Works

At RSVP, we offer you a promise we’ve never failed to meet. In-house customer service equivalence is the first step – and often the easiest one. The next step is to offer your customers far better service than they’ve ever enjoyed in the past. 

We achieve this by developing a real partnership with you so that we understand exactly how your business works. With a little help from tech tools, we’ll offer your customers that round-the-clock, omnichannel service they want. And, because we can scale our resources in response to customer needs, we never leave them waiting. 

Apart from keeping your customers happy, we offer you valuable market intelligence that you can use to guide your business strategies. In essence, it’s just like having an in-house team that’s constantly on duty to field those emails, attend to chat, monitor your socials, answer those calls, and report back to you.  

But there’s more. From admin to credit control, fulfilment support and data management, RSVP is here for you. Boost your customer service efficiency with our back office support solutions. It all starts with a conversation. Take the first step and get in touch!

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Subscription is a model that can benefit both the buyer and the seller in several ways. Let’s examine this in detail to see how subscriptions are used and how they can be helpful. 

Subscription-Based Business Model Examples

Most people will think of subscriptions like Netflix or Amazon Prime when talking about the subscription-based business model, but there are some surprises in store. You can subscribe to anything from deliveries of meat or farm-fresh veggies to regular packages of cosmetics samples or beard care products. 

Membership of certain organisations is also conducted on a subscription basis. For example, you might subscribe to a trade organisation, with your dues entitling you to use the organisation’s logo, attend events, benefit from industry-wide marketing, and receive industry-related news and information. 

Benefits of a Subscription-Based Business Model

Customer Benefits

Subscription-based models offer advantages to consumers. Convenience is one of these. For example, you can get your favourite magazines delivered to your door instead of having to hunt for them at your local newsagents. 

They can also offer opportunities to try new things for less. A wine of the month club may send you a bottle of wine you wouldn’t otherwise have bought, but find that you like, for example. 

Besides this, subscriptions can keep you up to date with the latest and the best iterations of a product or service without you having to lift a finger. As a subscriber, you receive updates as a matter of course. 

Businesses Also Benefit

Subscription-based businesses have predictable revenue streams, and every customer who signs up becomes a repeat client for as long as they continue with their subscription. Since customers automatically continue subscriptions unless they take action to cancel them, there’s a good chance that they won’t move to competitors. So customer loyalty is almost a given, as long as the subscription service delivers on its promises. 

With customers buying on auto, the lifetime value of each customer may be considerably greater than it would be if they had to trigger every repeat purchase themselves. There’s also a sense of “belonging” among customers who are subscribers. They’re ready to engage with the business, and if they’re happy with their subscription, they may even recommend it to other people. 

Finally, a subscription-based business has fewer peaks and lows and subscription businesses offering physical products are better able to forecast how much inventory they should have in stock at any given time. 

How to Build a Subscription-Based Business Model

The success of subscription-based business model ideas depends on what benefits you can offer to your customers. Put yourself in their shoes.

For example, you might take out a yearly gym subscription if that means your monthly fees will be lower. If the gym doesn’t offer better rates or perks for yearly subscriptions, you’re more likely to settle for a monthly membership – and if that doesn’t cost you less than just paying when you actually go to the gym, you might not even opt for a monthly commitment. 

So, the first thing you need for a successful subscription-based model is a clear benefit for your subscribers. Most subscription-based businesses rely on curation, replenishment, or access. 

Curation subscriptions mean that customers get products chosen by experts. For example, a wine of the month club uses trusted wine connoisseurs to choose wines for their customers. Subscribers don’t need to know a lot about wine to get the best wines on the market, and they don’t have to worry about making mistakes in their choices. 

Replenishment subscriptions give you the same products at intervals. They’re things you would ordinarily have to remember to add to your shopping list and then go out and buy. If the products arrive automatically, you have a constant supply without having to go to any effort. That’s a definite benefit!

Access-based subscriptions are typical of software subscription businesses. Their customers can access and use the software as long as they have an active subscription. But they can also relate to other business types. For example, a subscription may entitle a customer to specific perks like discounts, or access to products that aren’t available to the general public. 

The basics of building a subscription-based business are therefore offering a product or service that people will continue to want and a compelling reason why the subscription will be of benefit to your customers.

Subscription-Based Business Models Have One Thing in Common

If people are interested in it, it may be open to a subscription-based business. From serious subscriptions for business services to quirky subscriptions like a monthly supply of doggie treats, you may be surprised by the sheer range of subscription businesses out there.  However, there’s one thing that all subscription-based businesses have in common, and that’s the need for excellent customer service. 

When you have a subscription-based business, you have promises to keep, and customers with high expectations of the benefits in store for them. Since the potential for customer retention will be among your primary reasons for conducting business via subscriptions, you’ll need to take very good care of your clients. 

As your subscription business gains popularity, you may need some help keeping up with customer expectations and demand. Your mail room must run smoothly, returns must be processed efficiently, and customer questions must be answered professionally. 

Should you employ more staff and move to bigger offices? It may not be necessary when you choose RSVP for back office support services and customer care. We’re geared to nurture your customers and deliver on your promises – and you get to stay in charge the easy way. Contact us today and get our team on your side. 

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If they don’t pay on time, you’ll start following up with your debtors, reminding them that they have outstanding accounts. By collecting outstanding debts, you improve your cash flow and reduce your business’s risks. If all else fails, you will ultimately hand over the debt to a debt collection agency or a lawyer in the hope of ultimately recovering the money owed to you.

What is credit control? To sum all this up, we can say that it’s a set of policies and activities you use to determine who to extend credit to, how much each customer can buy on credit, what your terms are, and all the steps you might take to get debtors to pay you. 

Credit Control Policies 

Extending credit is always a risk, but some risks are greater than others. Some companies are very careful about who they extend credit to, and this approach is termed a “restrictive” credit control policy. Others make it easy for customers to buy on credit and have a “liberal” credit control policy. Businesses frequently choose a middle-of-the-road approach and they’re said to have a “moderate” credit control policy. 

Your credit control process, and the policy you adopt, will be based on your attitude toward risk. Having a restrictive policy means that you take few risks, but you could lose sales because it’s difficult to buy from you on credit. Having a liberal credit control policy makes it easy for your customers to buy on credit, but it’s risky because your business could land in financial trouble if your customers don’t pay.  

How to Identify Credit Risk

When extending credit, you’ll be interested in your customers’ financial health. For example, you may ask for bank statements, ask about their earnings and assets and find out what their current debt burden is. You should also delve into their credit history: do they usually pay their bills on time? Have they previously been taken to court over outstanding debts? When dealing with businesses, you’ll usually be looking at extending credit for purchases with a higher value, and since this means more risk, you’ll be even more careful. 

Whether investigating extending credit to individuals or companies, UK businesses usually do their credit checks through credit reference agencies like Experian, Equifax, and TransUnion. You should even be able to see the credit limits these agencies recommend for each customer, and staying within these limits helps to reduce the very real risks that go with covering your business’s costs and then not receiving payments from your customers. 

What is a Credit Controller?

If you extend credit to your customers, you need a credit controller. This person or team of people must monitor the credit your company extends to its customers, ensuring that they qualify for credit and pay their invoices. Activities include sending out statements, calling customers with outstanding accounts, sending written reminders, reconciling accounts, and reporting to financial managers.

Although the job may sound very factual and numbers-based, credit controllers need excellent people skills. They must have the ability to interact with their company’s leadership as well as its clients. And since it’s a job that’s all about money, tensions can run high, so they need to be able to remain calm under pressure. A good credit controller must have the ability to work with credit control software, but they must also have excellent customer service skills. 

Outsourced Credit Control Services: Should You Use Them?

As with any business function you outsource, the results you get will depend on who you outsource credit control services to. The time-consuming work of following up on payments, for example, can be outsourced, but you must be certain that the job will be tackled in the right way. 

Your company deserves to be paid, and your clients agreed to the terms you offered – but a gentle approach is more effective than irate demands when persuading debtors to prioritise the payment of outstanding invoices. If your credit controller alienates your debtors, you can be sure that they’ll delay payment for as long as possible – instead of settling up right away. It’s a delicate matter, and you need help from a company that has turned dealing with customers into an art. 

Strange though it may seem, following up unpaid accounts through credit control means “selling” the idea of paying your invoice. It takes empathy, patience, and there are times when it will require nerves of steel. 

RSVP, a London-based company specialising in all things customer-service related, offers back office services that include the credit control functions you’ve always wanted to outsource. Let us help you to collect outstanding payments while leaving your customers feeling nurtured and respected. It’s just one of the ways we put our team’s superb communication skills to work for our customers. Will you be the next to benefit? Contact us today!

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What do Ecommerce Marketing Strategies Consist of?

Effective ecommerce marketing means using both on and off site techniques to drive traffic to your website, and once prospects arrive there, everything is geared towards making those vital sales. 

On Site Ecommerce Marketing Techniques

You’ve probably heard of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). The simplest way to explain it is that SEO is a way of telling search engines what your business does so that it can rank you in searches made by the kind of people who might like to buy from you. Obviously, the higher your rank, the more likely you are to be seen, so the competition can be pretty stiff! It’s an ongoing effort to stay ahead of the pack. 

Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), on the other hand, is a set of strategies you’ll use once people arrive on your website or online store. What do you want them to do next? How will you make that action attractive enough for them to follow through? Conversion rate is usually measured by sales made, and every aspect of your website should be geared towards getting those sales. 

Both SEO and CRO require an in-depth understanding of your sales funnel, your customers and your competition, and CRO means being user-centric, giving your audience exactly what it wants, and making the conversion process easy and pleasant for those who want to support your business

Off Site Ecommerce Marketing Techniques

Various off site ecommerce marketing techniques contribute to your on site efforts. The ones you choose will depend on the type of business you have, but they address the key stages prospects go through before they become customers. 

Generating awareness that you’re out there and have something special to offer is the first step. The platforms and methods you choose depend on the audience you’re trying to reach, and they range from pay per click advertising to using social media platforms ranging from TikTok to Facebook and LinkedIn to get your message out there. The trick is not to spread yourself too thin. Choose platforms that work for you, and use them to the best possible effect.

Looking for more ideas? If you’re an authority in your field, creating guest posts for influential websites might be just the thing. Have you considered starting a podcast? Or perhaps you can get an influencer to try out your product and tell their followers about it. Do you offer solutions to common problems? You might become a YouTuber in your own right – or be a guest for a YouTuber who already has a large following. The possibilities are virtually endless. 

Our Top Tips for Ecommerce Marketing

1. Interactions Matter

When people try to interact with your business by commenting on social media or by sending messages, you need to follow up on their interest, and if you’re able to get their contact details, you can reinforce your efforts with ecommerce email marketing. The important thing here is to personalise. Generic messages are quite likely to fall flat. Try to pick up on the “conversation” between your business and the people who represent your sales prospects. 

Remember the basic steps in a sales funnel. Once people know you’re there (awareness), they might decide to find out more (discovery), they then evaluate what you have to offer, and if they’re satisfied, they form an intent to buy. But intention isn’t a sale yet – it may take a little nurturing to reach the final step: the sale! Sending a person who is already considering your products in the evaluation stage awareness messages, won’t be effective. 

2. Whatever You Do, Make it Easy for People to Take the Next Step

Whether you’re generating awareness on social media or have succeeded in driving traffic to your website, the next step must be an easy one for people to make. If they have to cast about for the next thing to do or don’t see what they want when they take a closer look, you just disincentivised the purchase. Needless to say, that’s the last thing you want to do. 

Your aim? Making things as easy as you possibly can! And if that means answering questions about your products or your methods, the responses must be rapid and on target regardless of the platform on which you received them. Once you have a hot sales prospect, part of your ecommerce marketing strategy should be taking steps to ensure they don’t have time to cool off. 

3. Offer Incentives

Consider offering incentives even before potential customers develop an intent to purchase. Contact details are worth their weight in gold. Can you offer information they’ll consider worth having? Your newsletters and marketing emails can add value for your customers and help keep you in touch. As an added reason to sign up, you might even offer a freebie such as a download or an e-book.

Once you start seeing signs of buyer intent, such as clicking on links and browsing your site, see if you can provide a reason for people to go through with the purchase. Can you offer a free trial? A time-limited discount or promo code? Create a sense of urgency by offering extras. 

4. Ecommerce Internet Marketing: Business Hours are 24/7

A large amount of your ecommerce internet marketing and marketing communications work can be automated, but there will be times during their journey towards conversion when people who are genuinely interested in your products or services need information that only a person can give them. The longer you make them wait, the greater the chances of losing what could otherwise have been a sale. 

Scenario: it’s 2 AM in your time zone, and your prospective customer is ready for onboarding or has questions about fulfilment. Who will help? We have the answers. RSVP is already recognised as one of the UK’s foremost contact centres. Did you know that we provide back office support services too? It’s 100 percent scalable, driven by state-of-the-art software that keeps you in control, and we’re always there for your customers. We know you’d like to be, but since that isn’t always possible, you can count on us to do you proud! Reach out today. Let’s boost your conversions and delight your customers!

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An average ecommerce conversion rate comes in at two to three percent. If you’re below that, set three percent as an initial goal. After that, you can strive to gain an above average conversion rate. What is a good conversion rate for ecommerce? Well, if you’re at the two to three percent mark, that’s not bad. Five percent would be excellent. So much for the numbers. What you really want to know is how to increase the conversion rate in ecommerce. Use these strategies to get more of those all-important sales.

1. See Where and When You Lose Your Audience

There are a great many reasons why your average ecommerce conversion rate may be lower than you like it to be. The first question is whether your site is attracting the right kind of traffic. If you have a high bounce rate, it means that visitors viewed only one page of your website and then left. Think about how they got there and why they lost interest. Could landing page optimization help to attract the right visitors and keep them browsing?

The average time people spend on your site is also of interest. Attracting traffic is just the start. Are you keeping them there long enough to make a sale? If not, why not? You can look at how many pages the average visitor viewed. If most visitors view several pages but your conversions are very low, your site may not be helping them to find what they’re looking for. 

2. Are You Displaying Your Products Well?

When we shop online, we can’t touch or try the items on offer. We can only look at them. Are you offering representations that help users to examine your products properly? High quality images, the ability to zoom in on images or view them from different angles, and videos showing your products at work will help your store’s visitors to form a clear picture of what you’re offering and help them to decide whether they want to make a purchase. Add a good product description specifying sizes and materials. Remember that if they’re unsure of the product, your store visitors won’t buy it. It’s as simple as that. 

3. Offer “Free” Shipping to Certain Regions or Countries

“Free” shipping is really just the delivered price of the product. Shipping is costly and, in any business, costs must be covered and profits made. However, “Free” is the language customers understand, and it helps them to evaluate the exact cost of purchasing. It can be very disappointing to choose an item only to find out that actually getting it costs way more than you thought it would. What would you do if you were this customer? You’d probably abandon your cart and log off. Needless to say, that hurts your ecommerce conversion rate and loses you a sale.

4. Offer a Discount – If They Buy Soon

You’ve probably seen limited-time discount offers online before. It’s a tactic used to hasten the decision-making process. If a person is genuinely interested in buying from you, they might act sooner if they know they’ll get a discount. If they wait, they will pay more, so they decide not to wait. It’s a fairly standard tactic, but it works quite well in raising conversions. 

5. Get the Price and Positioning Right

When you’re offering products that people can get elsewhere, you need to set your prices at a competitive level. If you’re offering an exclusive range of products, you need to present it as such and attract the kind of audience that will be willing to pay your prices. 

For example, if a customer is looking for leather belts, and yours are mass-produced and rather ordinary-looking, they’ll expect to pay less because they’re buying online. If your belts are high-quality, handmade items, your ideal customer is less interested in price, but will expect a slick, smart presentation. 

6. Make it Easy For Them to Part With Their Money

Once people start heading for the checkout, you’d expect the sale to be a done deal. But if the checkout process itself becomes a pain point, they’ll shrug their shoulders and simply leave. While you do need to take care of customer security, you also need to make it easy to complete a purchase. Keep it simple!

7. Let Them Know They’re Safe

You should be using robust security options to keep your customers’ information safe. You can provide cues by showing the logos for the security software systems you use and choosing trusted, mainstream payment options. SSL encryption is a must. You can also offer links to a page in which you describe the ways in which you keep customers safe. 

8. Make it Easy for Visitors to Find What They’re Looking For

Organise your site for easy browsing. For example, you can add a “Shop by Category” menu so that your site’s visitors can quickly navigate to pages displaying the type of products they are hoping to find. Search boxes on your website can also help, and you can use your banner space to showcase your top sellers. 

9. Don’t Force Them To Register in Order to Buy

Online shopping is all about convenience, so any extra processes that aren’t absolutely necessary will reduce your conversions. By all means, encourage users to register, but don’t make it a prerequisite for them to make a purchase. Upwards of three-quarters of online shoppers said they didn’t feel happy about being asked to register. That means that you stand a chance of losing all those sales if you insist on it. 

10. Use Chatbots and Live Chat

Chatbots aren’t as bad as they once were. You can “teach” them to handle a great many routine enquiries. But you also need to set them up so that they’ll transfer the conversation to a human support agent when necessary or at least offer that option. 

Nobody is going to spend ages trying to find the right question to get information out of a bot. They want relevant and helpful answers or they’ll move on. Offering human service options 24/7 can present a challenge, but it’s a problem that can be solved quite easily. 

Choose the Right Partners

Beating the average ecommerce conversion rate means partnering with experts in a variety of fields. For example, a User Experience (UX) designer is trained to remove any frustrations and difficulties your customers might encounter when navigating your store and its payment process. 

It will be economical to outsource your ecommerce customer support, especially if you want 24-hour support or support in several languages. To achieve the professional, customer-oriented experience you want your site’s visitors to enjoy, choose a company that is ready to train operatives to fully understand your business. 

The customer care workers they employ must be communications experts who are able to express themselves well, understand customers’ needs, and report any hitches back to you so that you can further improve your platform. RSVP’s Back Office Support Services have what it takes. So, if you’re looking to improve your ecommerce conversions, it’s time you got us on your side. Manning your customer support centre is just one of the ways we can help. Let’s talk sales!

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Once a customer has taken the plunge and signed on the dotted line, you need to make sure that they understand your product and know how to get the best possible value from it. That’s where customer onboarding enters the picture. Selling gets you a customer. Onboarding helps you to keep that customer satisfied and likely to recommend your product or support you again. 

In this guide, we’ll examine the customer onboarding process and how you can use it to build long-standing customer relationships.

What Is a Customer Onboarding Process?

The aim of customer onboarding is to make things easy for your clients, and to make them feel they’re well taken care of. Help your customers to feel they’ve made the right decision in choosing you by making the whole process easy, user-friendly, and rewarding. 

When you deal with customers in a face-to-face setting, a lot of the elements of customer onboarding occur in-store or at your offices. When working remotely, however, customer onboarding must be more carefully structured. 

The usual process begins with a welcome email in which you thank your new client for choosing your product or service. To strengthen the welcome message, many companies include a small gift, for example, a discount or special offer. If that doesn’t fit what you do, you will simply confirm that your client is now subscribed or that their purchase is being processed. 

When your customers must take some further action, such as setting up an account, you may decide to send a separate greeting message encouraging them to get started. It should include links to helpful resources, for example, an explainer video.

As your clients go through a setup process, your website or app can give them helpful hints and tips that show them how to get the most out of your product. With each interaction, they’re directed to set up or explore product features. You can also show them tutorials that demonstrate your product in action, but viewing these should be optional. 

Help menus, resource bases, or chatbots can help with commonly asked questions, and most people will be perfectly happy to go the self-service route. However, it’s really important to be accessible when your customers decide they need to talk to a human being. Chatbots should be programmed to offer a call or chat with consultants should their responses not contain the information your customers are seeking. Being hard to reach doesn’t create a good impression of your service, so make sure it’s easy to get human help whenever it’s needed. 

Even when it looks like everything is going smoothly, your customers will appreciate a follow-up mail from you to check on their progress and to discover whether they have any questions. Needless to say, if they do have any issues to address, responses should be prompt, helpful, and on-point. Follow up to ensure that all issues are now resolved.

Remember that Some, But Not All Onboarding Activities Can be Automated

A well-designed customer onboarding process should make getting started with your product so easy that it can be an automated process. Your customer onboarding strategy should ensure that information is drip-fed on an as-needed basis. If you try asking your clients to do too many things at once, the process begins to look complicated. Your customers may even feel that, rather than solving the problem that led to the purchase, you’ve only given them a new set of problems!

However, no matter how simple and well-structured setting up your service may be, there will always be people who have unusual questions, or who have difficulty understanding certain points. When they run into trouble, they will want quick, efficient, assistance from real people. 

Since a bit of give-and-take is often needed in order to understand their questions, voice chat is likely to be the most effective method. It also offers a personal touch. Can you remember an occasion when a company asked if they could call you to follow up on an enquiry? It made you feel valued, and you were impressed with the service, even if you were feeling pretty frustrated before the call. 

So, while you can use automation for a basic onboarding process that will work for most people, you still need to address the needs of the few. It’s likely that they’ve done their best to find answers for themselves, so by the time they ask for help, they’re already well and truly stuck. A bit of personal attention will go a long way towards restoring their confidence and boosting their satisfaction. The bottom line? Automate, but be ready to intervene with in-person service. 

Can Your Staff be Available 24/7?

Making customers wait is never a good idea. And with business being conducted across worldwide time zones, being ready to jump in when customers show signs of struggling with your product can seem like a tall order. It’s really not worth having staff on duty 24/7 just in case a customer wants help. So what’s the solution? 

While some companies indicate the times when help and support are available and simply tell customers to wait for their business hours to commence, that’s not customer onboarding best practice. Customer service, including onboarding, should be about what suits your customers rather than what suits you. 

Using a 24-hour call centre’s agents to field communications offers a solution. However, the call centre’s agents must be the type of people you’d like to have as brand representatives. That means choosing an exceptional company where agents are intelligent, helpful, well-informed, efficient, and empathetic – just the kind of people you’d like to speak to yourself!

At RSVP, our handpicked customer service and support personnel are ready to represent you with written and verbal communication that matches your brand’s image, resonating with your customers, and leaving them feeling like “you” have offered them best-in-class service. Talk to us about our Back Office Services and Solutions which includes customer onboarding, and find out just how easy and cost-effective top-notch, round-the-clock customer service and support can be. We take care of you by taking good care of your customers. Call us today.

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So, what is data management and how can you make it work to empower you? In this article, we’ll investigate this question and what you need to turn data into usable information. 

Data Management Defined

Data management is a process that covers how you collect, store, secure, and use data with security and cost efficiency as guiding principles. As with most definitions, this requires a little unpacking. 

When you collect data, consider what types of data will be the most useful to you and decide how you would use it. Simply collecting huge volumes of data which you never use is a pointless exercise. So, before you start collecting tons of information that may or may not be useful, consider your strategy. What do you need to know in order to fulfil your goals? 

Some data management could be related to your internal processes, and here, you should have direct access to the people and systems that offer information. But things get more complicated when you apply data management to the customer experience. 

For most companies, including those who are testing ideas before launching a product, this will mean finding out what their customers and potential customers think. Demographics may be among the data you want to collect, for example. Or you might want to know about the pain points that people experience when choosing a product like yours and whether your offering satisfies their needs. During the purchase process or after completing a purchase, what common issues arise? 

Used correctly, data becomes knowledge that helps you to achieve greater efficiency and provide better customer satisfaction. As customer service specialists, we’ll focus on the latter. And, since most data management platforms focus on external, rather than internal data, we’re on-point.

Data Management Platforms

Sifting through massive amounts of data by hand is costly, even if you can handle the volume of information you have to deal with. So using software like Salesforce, MediaMath, and Hubspot to store and process data makes a great deal of sense. Unfortunately, the best data management platforms don’t come cheap and you may need more than one to get to the heart of the information you value. Even if the cost of the platforms seems affordable, you still need people to contribute to them and employees who access their analytics to draw meaningful conclusions. This type of IT adds to your costs. That’s why outsourcing data management is a popular choice. More about this a little later on. 

Data Management Challenges

As we previously mentioned, the sheer volume of data to process can be absolutely staggering. If that data is stored in various places, it becomes even more difficult to collate results. And, of course, someone needs to evaluate data to ensure it’s accurate and worth analysing. 

Then, too, some data has limited usefulness, and even if it’s useful, you need to transform it into a format that systematically and accurately reflects results based on your data gathering and data analysis goals. 

Let’s not overlook the basic facts here: data gathering is easy enough, but analysis and interpretation are what make it useful, and these areas are remarkably complex and your company’s needs are individual enough to make this a complicated field. 

Data management privacy is also very important. If your customers share personal information with you, keeping it safe is vital. Failing to do so breaches trust – and it’s all too easy to fail. Just take a look at 2021’s data breaches involving big names like Facebook, Android, and LinkedIn. If these tech companies failed to protect user information, how are you able to do so? Should you fail, you face a PR nightmare!

You Aren’t a Data Management and Security Specialist: What Now?

Data management systems are vitally important to companies hoping to find out more about who their customers are and what they most need. But even specialists like LinkedIn have failed. You aren’t a specialist, but you need the information that flows from effective data management. When providing data, your customers need to feel safe and they need to know that every possible measure that protects privacy has been explored and implemented. Without these assurances, you won’t get the data you need. The next question is” “What now?” And, surprisingly enough, the answers might be easier than you thought.

Implementing a Data Management System the Easy Way

Since data management is a specialised area, it may be time to ask yourself whether you’re positioning your company as a data management specialist. If you aren’t, the process of data management may not fall within your core skills. When an important support function falls outside the areas in which you specialise, it’s nevertheless possible to get best-in-class assistance through outsourcing. 

When handling your customer-faced support and information needs, RSVP uses cutting-edge, and highly secure, software to collect and collate data that you need to grow your business. Apart from addressing customer enquiries and support needs, RSVP gathers information on your behalf; analyzes it; and gives you the distilled knowledge that helps you to more accurately target customer needs, address customer issues, and preempt queries. Needless to say, keeping your customers’ information safe is part of what we do. 

So, when you’re looking for a company that does much more than just handle customer communications, RSVP is the place to be. Want to know more? Contact us to find out how we implement data management best practices on your behalf. Our Back Office Services and Solutions could be what you need to turn data into actionable information while safeguarding both the data, and the people who provide it.

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