Keep Your Online Customers Happy: 7 Simple Tips

Sure, AI can assist you with customer service. But there’s a time when a human needs to take over to ensure customers feel they’re being looked after. You also need to monitor queries as they come in; are they being responded to quickly and correctly? All this can make customers feel heard; if not, they may leave your site and find another online store that cares a little more. Let’s see what you can do to keep customers happy.

Remember: When a customer leaves and doesn’t return, you’re not losing one order. They likely won’t return. That’s goodbye to repeat sales and referrals, too. One negative experience is all it takes to lose a good customer forever. So, respond quickly and with care.

Here are seven possible ways to keep your customers coming back to purchase from you time and again.

When Is a Customer Unhappy?

Whenever you don’t meet a customer’s expectations, they are probably discontented. This can happen even before they purchase anything, or when they make a payment, and after the sale has gone through and they are waiting for delivery.

Some common instances include:

• When it’s difficult to get through checkout. This includes the payment process. If this is a long, difficult experience, it’s unlikely the customer will return. In fact, they may not go through with payment at all.
• When they ask questions, and the chatbot doesn’t respond in a timely manner. Your AI chatbot should be designed to hand over to a human when things get difficult or sensitive.
• Customer support doesn’t keep a record of the conversation or the customer’s history, so it is unaware of what occurred and responds as if it hadn't heard from the customer before.

To the customer, these reasons are why they leave or never make the purchase. But these are fixable issues if you act fast.

7 Reasons Customers Are Unhappy & How to Fix Them

1.    Customers Receive Slow Responses

When a customer asks a question, they want a quick response; they don’t want to have to wait. When the query is about buying something, they are likely to go elsewhere if they don’t get a quick response. Typical queries include those about payment, delivery and returning the product if it’s not right. If you don’t respond to these quickly, you could lose a customer before they click to pay.

Why wouldn’t you respond quickly? Perhaps you haven’t set up the system to respond fast enough. Or maybe your team isn’t big enough to respond when the question is asked.

How to Sort the Issue:

You need to know when a query is urgent and how to respond accordingly. Your query and response system needs to be set up so you can respond quickly and efficiently. This way, your customer feels you care about their purchase as much as they do. Your site needs live chat that can answer common questions instead of making customers wait. And if the query is more complicated, it must be handed over to a human support agent.

2.    Customers Feel Ignored

Customers like to feel that you care about them, so if they feel you’re ignoring them, they will go elsewhere. To correct this, personalise your responses so they are warm and friendly, and don’t sound as if they are written by an AI bot. You want the person to feel as if you’re trustworthy and helpful.

How to Sort the Issue:

Your responses must be specific to the customer and the query. This is why a chat history is vital; it gives context and can be personalised. If the customer had a bad experience previously, you need to ensure it doesn’t happen again. With access to the customer’s history, you can offer extra care this time around. Personalisation isn’t just knowing the customer’s name; it goes much further than that. You need to have a human to take over who understands the situation and can respond accordingly.

3.    Inconsistent Customer Experiences

Personalisation also means giving your customer the same service every time, getting to know them through their history and acting with this information. Even if their query is the same, you can’t provide different responses each time they inquire. Don’t separate the customer’s history from their questions, even when they ask on different channels. You need to have your responses in a single place, so they are accessible.

How to Sort the Issue:

Previous conversations need to be kept in a single place so you can access them and remain consistent. Many customer service systems offer omnichannel support so that an agent can see everything discussed, whether it’s in online chat, on social media or via email, was discussed yesterday or a while ago.

4.    No Human Backup

It’s crucial a human agent takes over when queries are sensitive or difficult. The chatbot should be set up to respond to simple queries, but you must also have a system in place where a human agent takes over when the bot cannot handle the problem.

How to Sort the Issue:

Automation is great as a start, but an agent needs to be on hand to handle more complicated queries. The moment a chatbot feels out of its depth, it should immediately send the query to a human. Many chatbots are designed to escalate queries, so check when you set up yours.

5.    Not Listening to What Customers Say

If your customers are constantly telling you what is wrong and you’re not acting on this information, they will stop complaining and leave. Use the feedback you receive to improve your customer service so you don’t repeat problems.

How to Sort the Issue:

Take feedback seriously and act on it the moment you get it. Also, monitor common denominators in the feedback, as this will provide an idea of what to tackle first. Always follow up with the customer to find out whether the problem has been sorted satisfactorily; this will make your customers feel trusted and important.

6.    Not Training Your Support Staff Enough

Having a chatbot is one thing; having support staff on hand is another. That support staff also needs to be trained to confidently handle difficult, often emotional queries that a chatbot can't deal with. Don’t expect your staff to learn “on the job”. Rather, train them to do the job correctly.

How to Sort the Issue:

Provide the training your agents require. They need to know everything about the products and services you offer, as well as all the FAQs about delivery, payment, returns and shipping. They also need to learn certain customer support skills to handle customers who are irritated, angry or confused. In time, you’ll know which agents handle customers the best; when you do, let those agents handle more difficult or sensitive queries.

7.    Your Site is Slow or Difficult to Navigate

If you make your website easy to navigate, write clear instructions that are simple to follow and generally make the experience pleasurable, you’re halfway there. If customers are confused looking for products or payment methods, for example, or when your customer support isn’t up to par, you’re asking for problems. So, ensure your customer experience is top quality, and you’ll have fewer issues to handle.

How to Sort the Issue:

Remember, your customer doesn’t know your products and services the way you do. Often, they are accessing your website for the first time. So, make their experience simple to navigate and to pay. Look at the problems customers have regularly and fix those first. Simplify site navigation so everything is easy to access, including the chatbot for queries and searching for products. Most importantly, ensure the site loads quickly and easily, and that customer support is simple to find and access.

How to Check Customer Service is Improving

Here’s how to check if your customer service has improved:

• Check Your Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Score: To do this, simply divide your positive survey responses (all ratings of four or five) by the total number of responses you’ve received. Then multiply by 100 for a percentage.
• The Same Queries Appear Repeatedly: This means something needs fixing. It might be an answer to a query, or perhaps a better solution is needed to solve the problem.
• There Are Lots of Refund Requests: Maybe your customers don’t trust your products. If the time to receive a refund takes too long, it means the entire purchasing and refunding journey is out of whack.
• Customer Service is Constantly Swamped: Look at why this is happening, and if you find most issues revolve around dissatisfaction with something, use the seven tips we suggested above.