In this cold hard eCommerce world, businesses do not only compete with each other via the products or services they offer but also via making customers stay. It’s not the battle of which products are better or which ones are cheaper anymore, it’s the battle of who can attract more customers and have their loyalty.

And don’t be so naive thinking that once a customer buys from your online store, they’ll be with you forever, without needing you to make them so. Customers nowadays are smart and don’t limit their “bookmarked stores” to a few ones.

There are many things to do with becoming a customer-magnet. And there are even more things to do with customer retention. An excellent customer support service is one of the important and delicious parts of the cake.

In this article, I’m going to show you some ways to take you to your customer’s heart and make them stay with your eCommerce website. And yes, all the ways here cross the Customer Service Avenue.

1. Communicate, communicate, communicate

When customers visit your website, there are some ways you can communicate with them.

First – utilize customer service channels like live chat, email or forum to ask your customers about their shopping experience on your website. If customers buy from you, it means your business at least has what they need and their interest. An invitation to chat with customers, an email sent to customers to have a check-in conversation, or a sticky forum thread for after-purchase customers are the best ways to get connected with them and improve their experience with your eCommerce store.

Next, in your follow-up email sent to customers several days after their purchase, you can make it personalized with information like customer’s browsing history or viewed products. From this data, you can lift their perception of your brand to another level.

Besides, you can carry out a customer’s satisfaction survey to gauge their satisfaction level with your business and find out where you need to improve. The survey can be done via different methods, like asking right in a live chat session or sending an email to your customer’s inbox, or display a survey pop-up for registered customers.

Live chat software like Subiz can help you with chat invitation to ask about customer’s experiences or carry out a quick survey in live chat window. For email and forum channel, you can nail marketing and customer support with well-thought questions like why customers leave cart without checkout or why they leave your website, which service they’re looking for, etc.

Don’t be that type of business who sleeps on victory after winning a customer and then keep them in the dark forever. Reach out and communicate – talk to them.

2. Take the lead in solving customer’s problem

There’s a golden rule: give to get.

Focusing on delivering a real good support service means you’ll get adequate trust from your customers. And what makes an excellent customer support is to instantly solve your customer’s problems.

Be proactive and show that you are always here to lend your buyers a hand when they need your help. For example, why not craft a “How Can I Help You?” welcome on your live chat window when people visit your website? Or put the Contact Us page or Support Forum right in the website menu or footer so customers can easily find where to turn to when they’re in trouble?

Don’t be pushy to sell though. No selling when you support your customers – put your heart and mind in helping them instead. In return, you’ll have their email for your marketing campaign, or their 5-star rating for the service, even their loyalty to come back to you – isn’t that great?

3. Make it personal for customers

When providing support to your buyers, make them feel like you know them in person. Talk like you’re their best friend who understands their deepest wish. A study by Forrester showed that 72% of customers prefer to use self-service support (like live chat) to find help rather than phone or email support.

What does it mean?
It tells that customers want to be treated well in person, for better and faster solution delivery.

To be able to meet your buyer’s expectation, you need to know what exactly they expect first. Don’t make assumption about this. Use real-time conversations via live chat to gain deeper insight into your customer’s mind. Or carry out a survey among customers via Survey Monkey or Google Form.

Take a look at TheFeed.com as an example of personalizing sales for customers. This eCommerce store is selling food specialized for athletes, like snacks, chews, hydration, recovery drinks, etc.

It does a really good job in staying close to customer’s needs by tracking every customer’s shopping history with details like their food allergies, their favorite sports, or desired special training, etc. From these data, The Feed can refer customers the most suitable food and drinks, which is specialized based on their needs.

You can do the same for your online store. It’s always better to stay real and caring for customers than making them feel that you’re pulling on their wallet.

4. Go a step ahead with mobile-first experience

As listed by Business2Community, there are more than 50% of users visiting your eCommerce website via their mobile devices.

So, if your website isn’t responsive (really, what age are you living in?), or if your live chat application doesn’t display well on mobile, you’re letting your precious prospects go wasted.

One important factor of customer support contributes to an annoyance-free customer experience on your website is that it must not only be fast and right-to-the-point to solve customer’s problem, but also bring the ease when they join the conversation with support department.

For email or forum support, it’s easier if your website is already responsive. But for self-service support like live chat, you must use software that can automatically scale to fit the user’s mobile screen. It’s really a pain for customers to have to click on a tiny chat window and zoom in to see the conversation. You don’t support live chat for ants!

5. Repay your customer’s loyalty

Okay, let’s say you are successful in making people love your products and your brand. What’s next to do?

You’d better prepare to offer a customer loyalty program for your precious advocates. The ideas are numerous, like offering a discount or special coupon for loyal buyers, or setting up a reward points system to rewards buyers after reaching certain milestones.

Or if you think discounts and sales off can hurt your brand and product’s value, then free add-on services like free shipping, 30-day-money-back guarantee, etc. could be better. From customer support approach, you can consider a free lifetime support for loyal buyers.

Good user experience will keep people coming back to you. But once you get the advocate list, don’t skip the loyalty program to make them hooked even deeper on your brand.

6. Make your customer support up-to-par

If you want to stand-out from the crowd from your competitors, I must say that providing a brilliant customer service will ensure 50% of the chance to succeed with this attempt.

Acquiring customer’s loyalty doesn’t have to cost you blood and diamonds but you must be wholeheartedly dedicated in providing customer support. Make people feel like you are smiling when helping them out of their trouble. With that, your brand will shine through and you’ll gain more and more followers.

Do you have any other tips with winning customer’s trust to share? Feel free to comment below. If you haven’t been successful yet, I hope this article is helpful for you.