Best Practices & Tools for Profitable Ecommerce Customer Service

In the U.S., Gen Z and Millennials make the most transactions per year.

For these (mostly) digitally-native generations raised on instant gratification from ecommerce, expectations around the digital experiences brands provide are high.

For Shopify business owners, meeting the mark for these shoppers requires strategy and tooling that prioritize ecommerce customer service.

There’s a strong connection between customer experience, customer support, and growing your bottom line as a Shopify business owner.

This guide will help you understand that thread and come away with actionable practices and applications for bringing profit-generating ecommerce customer service to life.

What does ecommerce customer service mean?

Ecommerce customer service refers to the approach businesses take to support customers over the course of their digital experience with the brand.

Customer support is a critical factor in a company’s overall customer experience (CX).

In this day and age, online shoppers expect to connect with businesses through various channels, from owned websites to social media platforms, live chat, and so on.

For example, if you click on the “Contact Us” link in the footer of SOL Organics’ website, you can either fill out a contact form, or follow a link to one of their social media profiles.

By enhancing the breadth and quality of their ecommerce customer support, online retailers such as Shopify business owners can flip what’s usually a big expense into a rich profit center — and build better CX in the process.

Why the right customer service matters for ecommerce businesses

Modern customer expectations are sky-high. Between chatbots, AI-boosted automation, one-click purchasing, overnight shipping, and beyond, brands have set the stage for around-the-clock service expectations.

And now that the cat’s out of the bag, you can’t really reverse the trend. Instead, it’s time to embrace it.

Here are the key reasons Shopify business owners must care about the quality of their ecommerce customer service.

Increase sales numbers and amount

The fact of the matter is that poor brand experiences cost brands money.

The Qualtrics XM Institute’s 2023 Global Consumer Study found that organizations risk an average of 7% of their revenue when they don’t prioritize great customer interactions. This is because over a third of consumers reduce or fully stop spending money with a particular business after having a poor experience!

On the flip side, that means ecommerce businesses have the potential to increase the number of sales as well as overall revenue when they pursue best practices for customer service throughout the journey.

Build retention (which beats acquisition!)

Did you know that emotion — how interactions make customers feel — was found to be the most important factor in whether or not shoppers decide to recommend and repurchase from a brand?

For many Shopify businesses, customer service is the one opportunity you have to truly connect with consumers and build real, personal, and positive emotions and experiences. Most of us know how much more affordable and effective customer retention is than new customer acquisition — all the more reason to invest in caring customer service and reap the rewards of emotion-fueled retention.

Differentiate your brand with memorable experiences

Shopify business owners know that ecommerce shops abound. Shoppers nowadays have tons of options. That’s what makes it so critical to always be thinking of ways to set yourself apart.

The great news is customer service can be a major differentiator. After all, consumers report being disappointed in more more than one out of every ten business interactions.

With the great customer service tips and tactics in the next section, you can create a personalized, thorough shopping experience that’s efficient, effective, and memorable in all the right ways.

Reduce damaging negative reviews

For small Shopify brands, even just a few less-than-positive reviews can stand out and tank your reputation.

Prioritizing modern best practices around customer support can prevent negative experiences from occurring. In addition, being at the top of your support game means you can also address and work through a consumer’s issue, ideally before a public negative complaint is made.

5 ecommerce customer service best practices

Considering its power to actually impact revenue, retention, and brand recognition and reputation — really great customer service isn’t just a “nice to have” any longer.

No matter your industry or size, customer service that powers a delightful customer experience is a requirement to compete and stay relevant.

Ready to leave behind the costly, half-baked strategy and pursue profit-driving support?

Let’s transform.

1. Multichannel is the only way forward

As part of the growing desire for personalization in ecommerce — more on that shortly — a one-size-fits-all approach no longer works.

Customers expect an experience that makes them feel valued and respected — aka support that meets them where they are.

Some folks will always prefer getting a customer service agent on the phone. Others may want to chat, but online instead. Many will desire to take the convo to the social media channels or email inboxes they check throughout the day.

And then, there’s the fact that many of these interactions will occur over several days across multiple communication channels!

This makes providing a seamless, organized customer service experience across channels a key goal for organizations that want to create a memorable, modern customer service strategy.

2. AI-enabled personalization is the future (and the present)

Sure, quick answers suffice for basic questions, but there are many moments when customers seek a personalized touch.

Ecommerce customer service today goes well beyond package tracking and processing refunds. To provide the best experience, brands must be ready to offer advice to help customers make informed purchases. They must become experts — offering personalization which creates a memorable and reputation-building service experience.

At scale, especially for small businesses, this is next to impossible.

Unless you get the right tooling involved.

AI-powered customer service platforms are one of the best ways to support (not eliminate!) your customer service teams. By automatically combing the data to understand customers’ communication history, buying patterns, and likely preferences, AI-enabled tools give agents (or *ahem* owners like you) personalized insights into exactly how to help. The outcome is faster, higher-quality support that you and consumers will love.

3. Offer self-serve support for those who want it (chatbots, etc.)

Yes, omnichannel, personalized service should absolutely be an option in your customer support experience.

But, that doesn’t mean self-service shouldn’t also be available for those customers with simpler questions, or who prefer to work through it themselves. Self-service support modes are great for reducing the workload on customer service teams and improving the customer experience, whether you deal with a high volume of inquiries or simply want to offer round-the-clock assistance.

What does it look like to provide effective self-service customer service?

• Knowledge base: A centralized collection of information is a great self-service resource for customers. It may include articles, guides, tutorials, and troubleshooting tips that answer common questions and help users solve problems on their own. An organized knowledge base allows customers to find the answers they need quickly, usually via a powerful search, without having to contact support.
• FAQs: Make easy-to-find lists of common questions and their corresponding answers regarding your key products, services, or processes (like shipping and returns!). FAQ sections allow customers to get quick answers to basic questions without needing to interact with a human.
• Chatbots: On-site chats powered by AI, automation, or both give shoppers instant responses to queries. You can program chatbots to handle basic tasks like looking up refund progress or integrate them with AI tools to provide more thorough support. And they can even get “smarter” over time.

4. Get faster — or get more realistic with response times

Online shoppers expect timely responses from brands.

Over half of consumers report that “waiting for a reply” is extremely frustrating.

The best practice to handle this is two-fold.

On one side, look for ways to streamline and thus speed up your support process. This may mean hiring more customer service reps. Or, for smaller brands, it probably looks like onboarding the right customer service software to help you get more done in less time — our suggestions for those coming up in the next section.

And on the other side, you may simply need to set more clear expectations around possible response times — and ensure that you meet or exceed them. This means getting realistic and truthful about the availability of service reps and the timeline for expecting a response. If phone support is limited to specific hours, or email responses typically take a few days, set yourself up for success by informing your customers.

5. Build a dream team

While we've heavily discussed the role of technology in ecommerce customer service, building those strong, memorable, emotion-based customer relationships you're looking for ultimately does require a human touch.

Enter: highly-skilled support personnel.

Even if your support team is small, or just consists of you at the moment, here are some top techniques for making sure anyone who interacts with customers leaves a great impression:

• Home in on hiring: What are the most important goals and tasks for customer service? Which soft skills will you prioritize? How will you know they’ll vibe with your company culture? Are they willing to keep learning and growing? Keep these questions in mind when creating job descriptions, interviewing candidates, and hiring to flesh out your support team.
• Invest in training and upskilling: All the expensive tools in the world won’t make customer service profitable if your team can’t use ‘em. Provide ongoing courses on evolving customer service best practices, answering queries on your offerings, and using support-focused tech.
• Create systems, document processes: The framework that makes your support team operational is vital. Once you’ve found a good groove, record your systems and make sure your staff follows them, so you can provide excellent, consistent customer service.

4 tools to improve customer service for ecommerce

Training, empathy, speed, organization, and personalization are critical to generating a profit from your customer service efforts.

But do you know what underpins each of these elements?

Technology makes it all possible when expectations soar but time is at an all-time low.

Let’s explore the top tech for automating, scaling, and enhancing customer support.

1. OpenDesk for support ticket AI and automation

At OpenDesk, we know that fast, accurate, and personalized support is important to you.

Yet, there’s hardly any tooling out there that gives you what you need to deliver on that goal — especially within the time and resource constraints you’re working with.

That’s why we built OpenDesk, to transform support into retention by using AI to leverage your actual, real-time customer data.

Use OpenDesk to:

• Prioritize tickets so the right support is delivered to the right customers — right on time.
• Dive deeper into what issues spawn the most customer support tickets, so you can solve individual problems more readily and also reduce overall complaints.
• Further personalize support to nip losses in the bud and even set the stage for upsell and retention efforts.
• Connect every customer-facing channel through one, intuitive inbox.
• Optimize your supply chain through customer feedback insights.

With OpenDesk, intuitive, AI-powered customer support automation is affordable and achievable.

Join the waitlist to find out how OpenDesk can help you scale your business while still providing stellar support.

2. Shopify Inbox for real-time chat

Shopify Inbox is a well-known Shopify app you can use to chat with customers as they shop.

See what they’ve viewed, bought, or just placed in their carts to personalize support in real time. And when you can’t be online, use the app to set up automated greetings, serve FAQs, and collect contact information to follow up when you’re ready.

Shopify Inbox is free to install.

3. HappyFox for omnichannel support management

HappyFox is robust customer support and help desk software that can help unite customer service teams across channels and strategies.

HappyFox can easily provide as much organization as ecommerce support teams need — with workflow automation and management, ticketing support, reporting, integrations, a single inbox for multichannel support, and other features like built-in chat and a knowledge base.

Currently, a basic plan begins at $9 per agent, per month (annually). Features increase with each pricing tier.

4. Document360 for building your knowledge base

Document360 lives up to its promise to help brands handle all things documentation with capabilities for building out public and private knowledge bases as well as user manuals, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and more.

On the knowledge base front, customer support teams can work with Document360 to create an AI-powered portal that provides instant assistance to customers and equips support agents with in-depth resources for quicker problem solving.

Get started with Document360 for free.

Optimize all your customer support channels with OpenDesk

The time has come to stop thinking of customer service as simply a support function.

Truthfully, it has the potential to be a powerful channel for differentiating your brand, driving additional revenue, and building lasting loyalty.

But profit can only come when you can boost efficiency and effectiveness by leveraging modern best practices and tooling.

Ready to introduce smart automation for better customer support ticket handling? How about tapping into smart emotion detection so you can stop negative reviews in their tracks? And why couldn’t you use AI to speed up personalization efforts so your support team can do more, more effectively?

It’s all possible with OpenDesk.

Join the waitlist now for your chance to see what it’s like to work with the only support platform fully focused on helping you boost your Shopify business CX and retention.