It's the gift-giving season, and a lot of online stores will see a temporary spike in traffic and sales from people looking for great gift ideas.
Holiday traffic and sales are great, but it's not all fun and profits.
Online stores can also see a corresponding (but thankfully temporary) increase in customer service inquiries and complaints.
The more people buying from you, the more chances for something to go wrong.
There's no better time than now to make sure your customer service offerings are up to snuff.
Rather than waiting for complaints to roll in, you can take some proactive steps to eliminate possible customer confusion and avoid potential hassles.
Making sure pertinent information is present on your product pages and FAQ can help clear things up from the get-go.
In a recent post, Shopify explains three things you can do to get ready.
Whether you search your own recollections or talk to your support staff, it’s helpful to consider previous holiday issues that could have potentially been avoided with preparation.
You’re especially looking for low-effort, high-impact improvements that can be made now.
Consider, for example:
1. Adding information to your product pages to head off follow-up questions, instead of answering each one individually.
Are people asking about product sizing, or color choice?
Does the manufacturer have additional product details you could include on your own pages?
2. Revise your contact form to ask for specific details up front, and avoid having your customer wait for an answer that is only another question.
E.g. do you sometimes need to know their order number or the email address they used for a purchase?
Add optional fields to your form to encourage customers to provide this information up front.
3. Improve your product page layout to reduce causes of confusion.
If you see your customers asking questions where the answer is already listed on your website, information design and layout may be the cause.
Common examples include making the currency obvious, making shipping costs appear up front, and including size charts.
If you’ve been using a help desk to manage customer service, you may have reports that can help you surface root causes of common support requests. Tagging incoming contacts can be a valuable source of quick win ideas.
If you spot a surge in questions tagged as “pricing” you’ll be able to investigate and respond with improvements quickly, reducing the number of incoming questions later on.
You can find more tips for dealing with an influx of new customers during the holiday season in the full post from Shopify.
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