HelpFlow Blog
How Customer Service and Marketing Should Collaborate in eCommerce
An e-commerce marketing team always wants to know what’s working to drive sales to understand customers better and drive more. In contrast, the customer service team typically gets bombarded with ticket volume – especially when marketing succeeds at driving more sales. This can create a bit of an adversarial relationship between marketing and customer service.
It’s possible, though, to supercharge each team by aligning them. By aligning marketing and customer service, both departments can reach goals together.
Improve Your Product Pages with Insight from Live Chat
Improving the user experience of your product pages can be a great way to drive growth. Not only do you provide a better experience for customers, but you can increase the revenue per visit from your existing traffic sources. Pure profit.
With that said, identifying improvements to make can be difficult past a certain point. Yes you can split test ideas, but that takes time and wastes resources on tests that don’t really move the needle.
A great way to identify ways to improve product pages is to get insights directly from customers. If you’re already using live chat on your website, you can use those conversations to get a lot of insights. This doesn’t mean just reading conversations, it means being systematic about mining the live chat channel as a gold mine of customer insight.
Managing Quality in Customer Service (At Scale)
When you start your brand, you put care and attention into every customer interaction. As you go through the Customer Service Team, you learn to train agents to do a good job. But as the team grows, especially when you start to hire managers, it could be tough to maintain your expectation of quality. You can feel like the quality is breaking down at a certain point.
Not only does bad customer service tarnish a brand which brings down sales, but it can also significantly increase expenses due to the sheer inefficiencies of bad processes. A double whammy hit to profits!
Quarterly Goal Setting Process for Teams
Focused execution is what creates results in business. This is simple in the early days when you have a small team, as you all focus on the same thing. But as a team grows, focus can spread and cause execution to slow down.
Maybe you’ve reached a point like that in your own business? Eventually, you and your team can feel like you’re slogging through each day without a clear long-term plan. Then, it turns into a grind.
Use Social Proof in Live Chat and Customer Service Conversations to Boost Conversions
Customers trust other customers more than you, even if you’re not using high-pressure sales tactics. At the end of the day, social proof is a critical factor in getting customers to buy.
You’re probably already using product reviews, but if you’re just showing them in the typical places on your product page, they can be easily overlooked.
Integrating social proof into more noticeable but natural feeling areas can massively boost conversion. Ezra Firestone has shared that adding product reviews in place of product titles increased average revenue per user by 13.7% – which drove an additional $30,000/month for their store at their size at that time.
3 Ways to Streamline Your Customer Service Workflow in Gorgias
Customer service is hard to manage due to the sheer volume of tickets and the never-ending slot of new tickets coming in. Well, you probably have plenty of ways you can improve your customer service infrastructure to be more efficient, it can be difficult to make system level changes since you can’t easily slow down day to day to implement them.
Many stores already use Gorgias for their customer service software. However, there are many ways to streamline workflow even if you’re already using Gorgias by leveraging a few parts of the system better. By implementing just a few things well, you can save 20% or more of your team’s time, which translates into massive cost savings (not to mention a happier, not overworked team).
Maximize Email Campaign Performance By Aligning with Live Chat
It’s hard to figure out which marketing approaches are best for your e-commerce business. Also, once you get a few channels working it can be difficult to get those channels working together. At a certain point, they might even start working against each other and cannibalize revenue.
Having multiple working channels is great, but if you can align them with feeding each other, you can supercharge both results. You are probably already aligning landing page copy with offers in your advertising campaigns, but you can also make a similar approach with more granular aspects of your marketing. For example, aligning the live chat experience on your website with your email marketing campaigns.
How to Get Actionable Site Improvement Ideas From Customer Service Operations
Many stores under-invest in website usability improvements. Once you have the basics in place, it’s hard to know what usability improvements will move the deal on conversions and sales. In short, you run out of ideas and stop focusing on it.
But with a few small tweaks to your customer service workflow, you can have a never ending stream of extremely high impact usability improvements for your team to execute on. The live chat and customer service tickets your team are already working on can be a gold mine of improvement ideas.
KPIs to Measure Live Chat Performance
Live chat is a great way to drive customer satisfaction and sales. Not only does live chat have the highest customer satisfaction score of all support channels, but it also drives a 4 to 6x higher conversion rate when you chat with visitors compared to if you didn’t. Chat works.
The challenge with live chat is that it’s a lot of work to manage. By adding watch out to your website, you end up with a lot of chat volume, and you need to have proper staffing to handle the volume. As the volume starts to overwhelm your team, it’s natural to think, “Is this worth it?” for the business and the customer.
Actual Abandon Cart Sequence Schedule We Use
We run 24/7 live chat teams for a ton of stores, and a big part of how we drive sales is saving checkout abandons with live chat. But we’ve also been able to see the inner workings of a lot of abandoned cart sequences.
What type of sequence for sms and email are guys using? Have you seen any massive impact with small changes? We found that layering in the SMS right after the abandon (subtle not salesy) can work really well.
