How to Get Fewer Customer Emails and Make Your Life Much Easier
Whether you’re?launching a new business?or growing a big brand, dealing with customer queries can become a chore. You’ll either need to deal with them yourself (taking time away from other tasks) or pay a team to manage them.
Either way, it’s going to be expensive or time-consuming, and the key to being successful is often just about effective management of both time and money.
With that said, the following tips will help you to reduce customer queries without angering your customers.
Create FAQs
Many customers will have questions about your product(s) and will need these to be answered before they commit to a purchase. If your website can’t answer those questions, most customers will leave and look elsewhere while a minority will hassle your customer support team.
To prevent an avalanche of emails, include a list of FAQs on your website and individual product pages. And don’t just include the questions that you?think?will be asked. Include the ones that are actually being sent to your support team.
Ask your support team to create a list of the most commonly asked questions and reword their answers for your FAQ.
You’ll still get the occasional email from customers who either didn’t see your FAQ or completely ignored it. But they are the exception, and the majority will search the FAQs before resorting to messaging you.
The FAQs should be short, snappy, and easy to navigate. Don’t turn them into mini-articles and stuff them under the fold. You’re writing for your customers, not for Google.
Use Images and Video
Photo by?Jakob Owens?on?Unsplash
Customers are very visual. After all, your goal as an online retailer is to mimic the land-based retail experience, which means allowing them to view every inch of the product and understand it as if they were holding it in their hands.
Images and video can help with this. If it’s a food product, show them pictures of it inside and outside of the packet. Show it incorporated into a meal and make sure you include a picture of the ingredient label. If it’s a musical instrument, record a video that shows it being played and covers several different musical styles.
It doesn’t matter if you have already written about some of these things in the description. And it definitely doesn’t matter if some of the features you’re highlighting seem obvious and implied. Cover everything, as you never know what kind of customer you will get and what kind of questions they will have.
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Automate the Order Process
Photo by?Sai Kiran Anagani?on?Unsplash
The vast majority of customer queries are a variation of, “Where is my order?”. Most will only email you when their order hasn’t appeared after many days, others will message you as soon as they place an order to ask how long it will take and who will deliver it.
By automating the order process, you can answer all of these questions for them and skip over the endless queries.
eCommerce platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Amazon will send automatic emails as soon as an order has been placed, processed, and dispatched. You can customize these emails to tell customers their order has been received, is being processed, will be shipped by X courier, and will take X days to arrive.
If you are expecting a delay, these systems will let you email all customers in advance to warn them and thank them for their patience. It shows that you care and it reduces the number of “where’s my order” emails.
Don’t ignore your customers. Don’t assume that a delay is going to be okay because “they will get it in the end”. This is 2021. Customers are used to getting same-day or next-day delivery courtesy of companies like Amazon Prime and they consider 3 or more days to be a delay.
If the customer doesn’t have their order 5 days later, only for you to tell them that there was a delay after they email you, they’ll be angry and you’ll risk a bad review. Always keep your customers in the loop — you’ll be surprised at just how understanding they are.
Encourage User Reviews
Photo by?Markus Winkler?on?Unsplash
Reviews are an essential part of the product buying process. They provide social proof and encourage consumers to take the final step, going from a window shopper to a paying customer.
Reviews say, “This consumer is similar to me and has benefited from this product”, which is often all that they need.
Whether you’re?building a brand on Amazon, Shopify, WooCommerce, or another platform, you need reviews. You can place them directly on your website/page or incorporate them through Instagram apps and sites like Trustpilot.
The best way to get reviews is just to ask for them. Take Trustpilot as an example. I once worked with a business that had a Trustpilot page but didn’t do anything to get reviews. They averaged around 1 review for every 10,000 sales as a result.
At the same time, I know businesses that average 1 review for every 15 sales simply by signing up for a Trustpilot account, syncing their websites, and sending “please review us” emails and links with every sale.
You can’t simply sit back and wait for the reviews to come. Customers need encouragement, and that encouragement should be more than a simple request. Make it easy for them by including links and they will be significantly more likely to leave a review.