Excellent customer service is a must in the modern digital world. No matter how good your product or service is, potential customers may have worries, questions, or concerns about it and they expect companies to provide prompt responses. If you’ve created a website to use as the primary marketing channel, it’s important to optimize your website for customer service and therefore stand out from the crowd of competitors.
Among the key battlegrounds you must pay more attention to is your website. When well structured, your website is a great customer service delivery channel. It provides the means to showcase how and where users can reach your customer service, including live chats with integrated AI-powered chatbots, social media links, email addresses, phone numbers, and forms, to name a few. Before we dive into website hacks to improve customer service, let’s highlight the top reasons you need to invest more in the function.
The Importance of Customer Service
With the variety of companies on the market, people choose brands that stand out from the crowd with good customer service. As specified in the latest research by Helpscout, offering excellent customer service turns 86% of one-time customers into long-term clients as 93% of people are ready to make a repeat purchase after having a positive experience with customer support agents.
Let’s also take a look at the data from Financesonline:
The bottom line? Investing in customer service offers notable benefits, including:
- Improve reputation and credibility: Timely and effective resolutions create a positive customer experience. This paints a good brand image, meaning users can easily trust your brand.
Helps differentiate your brand from the competitors: Customer service helps grow healthy relationships. This makes your brand more memorable, helping differentiate it from the competitors. - Fosters loyalty: A positive customer experience enhances satisfaction rates. Satisfied customers are more likely to stick to your brand longer. Loyalty is invaluable since such users can also advocate for your brand, enhancing your reach.
- Enhances a customer’s lifetime value: A positive customer experience and loyalty means the users are more likely to make repeat purchases. This helps a brand get more from customers beyond their first purchase. Even better, as they act as brand advocates, they bring in more referral business. Such lifetime customer value significantly supercharges your efforts to build a more profitable business.
- Helps cut down operational costs: Effective customer service eliminates concerns like unnecessary cancellations, cart abandonment, and returns. You provide fast and reliable solutions that move users along the customer journey. Fast resolutions minimize friction that could frustrate users, hence fewer cases that could cost your business. Even better, you grow a loyal customer base that is easier and cheaper to market to, further lowering costs.
Effective customer service could be the secret weapon you are yet to optimize for improved business progress. Now, let us dive into ways you can optimize your website for improved customer service.
Make it Easy to Contact Your Customer Service Team
Imagine a user browsing your website but can’t find contact details. They could be just about to make a purchase but need clarification. If they can’t easily find and reach customer service, that’s lost business. You can avoid this by prominently displaying your contact information. This means a user won’t struggle to find contact information like phone number, live chat link, or email address, among other options.
As you strive to make your customer service easy to find, ensure your website has clear navigation directing users to relevant pages. You can kick the efforts a notch higher with a search bar and visual cues like images and icons that help users easily spot the contact information.
Deliver Omnichannel Customer Support- Optimize Your Website
Ensuring your website provides multiple ways to reach your customer support team provides flexibility. Omnichannel customer support ensures customers can reach you regardless of the preferred channels. Embracing unified omnichannel support means users can reach you through virtual phone, live chat, social media, and more without missing a beat.
A unified interaction strategy facilitates fluid communication even when users switch between channels. Your support team doesn’t lose the users’ context since the unified platform provides all the necessary information. Such support provides a great customer experience. That’s because you deliver fast and personalized support, demonstrating your knowledge of their needs.
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Offer Customer Self-Service
AI-powered chatbots are quickly making their mark in the customer support arena. This is more so as advanced models demonstrate the ability to understand context, emotions, and user sentiments. This means the chatbots deliver relevant and human-like responses. Including this in your website helps facilitate reliable self-service support. This trend is gaining popularity since users can solve problems independently and at any time. Besides AI-powered chatbot systems, you can include:
- Comprehensive and interactive FAQ pages
- Downloadable resources
- IVR voice recording
- Knowledge base/help center packed with tutorials, guides, and informative articles, to name a few
Such resources mean users don’t have to wait around to talk to a human agent. They enjoy fast and comprehensive support 24/7, which improves customer experience.
4. Provide Social Proof on Your Website
Social proof helps build trust and credibility. If there is a great time to showcase social proof, it is when users are uncertain about something. This is usually the case when they are about to contact customer service. Showcasing social proof on your website can significantly boost your business performance, including encouraging users to contact your customer support.
You can provide social proof with customer reviews, ratings, and testimonials. You can also include case studies and success stories highlighting experiences customers have had engaging your brand. It also helps if you encourage users to share their experiences on the site or social media platforms. Such user-generated content acts like word-of-mouth recommendations. It builds credibility and confidence users need to contact your business and engage further, like making a purchase.
If you have an email list, it’s a good idea to reach out to your loyal customers and ask them for feedback or reviews so that you can repurpose this content for website social proof.
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5. Analyze Your Website Visitors’ Behavior- Optimize Your Website
How can you tell how well your customer service performs without monitoring and analysis? Tracking your website metrics, including visitor behavior, helps you uncover a lot. You’ll determine which pages are frequently visited and the content they interact with most. This makes mapping out the customers’ journey easier, allowing you to spot potential problem areas.
You can kick the user behavior analysis higher with measures like user surveys and feedback forms. The gathered feedback and complaints offer valuable insights, including primary pain points and areas for improvement.
The Bottom Line on Optimize Your Website
Your website is a valuable gateway to your brand. You shouldn’t discount customer service while focusing on search engine optimization to improve discoverability and visibility. Your website may contain valuable content like compelling product descriptions and images. It could also be technically optimized, making it fast and responsive across different devices. However, if customer support is lacking, you’ll likely fail to realize its potential. Besides ensuring that users can easily find and contact customer service, you must also ensure they are responsive. This means providing prompt, professional, and personalized customer support.
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