Why customer care matters?
Have you noticed that most of your customers leave the store, even before reaching the checkout? And in your contacts (hmm, and whether you have that?) periodically appear questions about the compatibility of the products or their application? Perhaps it is time to create a complete customer care service.
Customer service is important for any company that is building one of the channels of communication with their clients through the web. In real life there are other accents to communicate with customers, more psychology more impulsive and spontaneous decisions. When the client is left alone with emotionless screen he gets more time for thinking and decision-making and. Distance to a competitor is no longer measured in meters, now it’s several clicks. So as soon as the customer does not find an answer to his question – the chance that he will go to look for it somewhere else becomes extremely high. Particularly acute is possible to feel in e-commerce.
Magento customer service on the concept is no different from any other similar service implemented on other platforms, but let’s look at the implementation in detail.
There are 5 classic channels of customer support:
- -Via email
- -Via social media
- -Via live chat
- -Via helpdesk
- -Via phone
Naturally, you can limit yourself to any one channel, but studies show that poor customer care rather than simply not help increase loyalty, promotes the outflow of permanent members of the store. So, if you decide to create a customer care service, you need to worry about the quality of its implementation, in particular, to make it as extensive as possible.
Let’s have a closer look at the implementation of each channel separately in Magento.
Email Support
The simplest and most affordable way. However, it does have a few tricks that can come in handy.
The channel has only two elements – a contact form and a mailbox. By default this channel is created in Magento almost out of the box – a contact form is usually on the CMS page yourdomain.com/contacts/. If you instead of this page see the 404 – look in the backend – Admin Panel – System – Configuration – General – Contacts where page can be Enabled, and the address and the sending settings can be configured (if you are having difficulties – do not hesitate to ask in the comments to the post, we will try to help you).
Also, you can easily add a contact form to any CMS page using code snippet from below:
<!– CONTACT FORM –>
{{block type="core/template" name="contactForm" form_action="/contacts/index/post" template="contacts/form.phtml"}}
<!– END OF CONTACT FORM –>
Unfortunately, for editing the form or for adding there a new field, you need to edit the template.
Speaking of advice, which will contribute to the the quality of implementation of the channel, it is necessary to note the following:
- For e-mails from the contact form it is better to have a separate corporate mailbox, not to miss an important message among the personal mail.
- Try to respond to people as quickly as possible. It may be advisable to put even an autoresponder that the message delivered to the customer and will be processed soon. But don’t try to fool the customers, try to constantly keep abreast of, and keep customers informed about your steps and actions.
- Check the spam section in your mailbox – among the trash there might be accidentally lost an appeal of the client.
Social Media
Of course, I doubt that your business still does not have pages in social media, but if you do not have – it is time to create, Twitter and Facebook are perfect fit for customer care . Here, too, you can go two ways – simple and complex.
The first involves placing on your pages (for example, in the footer) links to pages in social media. I think the topic of the importance of social media for e-commerce deserves a separate article. Adding links in the footer is not a difficult task, but out of the box it is not administered from Magento back-end. If you still have such need you have access to the code – we are happy to share this simple technology, please contact us in comments to the post.
The second method involves the use of API of Twitter or Facebook. This can be done by hand – to generate the necessary code snippets see your developer’s account in the appropriate network, or use one of the many extensions from Magento Connect, which will provide the same functionality, but without directly modifying the code.
As for the functionality that you get in the case of Facebook – it allows users to ask questions about the products, answers to which are not found in the product description or elsewhere on the site. The main difference from the built-in Magento reviews is that you have the opportunity to directly, on behalf of the account that represents your brand, answer users’ questions in interactive way. To start using the Facebook Comment Social Plugin you need to register your application here and use App ID which will be assigned to you.
Usually, this is the only thing that is required for extension to link with Facebook. Also, you should be warned that Facebook rigidly binds comments to the URL, where it was left, so if you change the URL key of product – you should think about some customization of extension or your code, but, in fact, it is quite simple – in the URL which requests information from Facebook should only just be a parameter with the correct URL, which is bound to your old comments.
If you want to use a Twitter account to communicate with your customers, then keep in mind that the people who will ask questions via tweets, expect to receive a response within half an hour or hour, everything that is outside of this timeframe risks being perceived as bad service. Extensions that offer integration with Twitter usually offer two features: a button to create tweet, as well as a block to show the last few tweets of account to which they belong. And if the first feature makes sense to spread links to your products via social networks, the second raises questions. First of all – if you can be fast enough to answer the user’s question to remain in his/her field of attention (even following him on almost all pages with tweets Block)? And also – perhaps there are questions that the user does not dare to ask and put them on display via social media plugins, but the answer he needed should have a faster response than the contact form? We gradually come to yet another channel of providing customer service…
Live Chat
This is definitely the best way to response to a user with speed of lightning without creating unnecessary inconveniences. Unobtrusive bar which follows him through all the pages will always be at hand from the buyer in any issue case – but you should be able to be online for customer as long as possible during the day. Most live chat services offer the built-in contact form instead of chat – but this is not what the curious user expects to see.
While installing live chat will take you minutes and receiving a code/extension is free, you have to part with amount starting from $ 17/month per agent.
As for the installation, on such services providers’ sites you can get the code to be placed in section on all of your pages. Making this with the help of Magento is quite simple – go to the Admin Panel – System – Configuration – General – Design – HTML Head and put your code into Miscellaneous Scripts text area.
From the service providers we can advise Zopim and Olark. Olark also provides an excellent extension, which not only implements the code in the system, but also allows you to manage a certain set of events – for example, switching to a specific page or adding to cart of goods for a certain amount.
Let us consider the 4th channel.
Helpdesk
Instead of hiring more agents to communicate with customers via live chat and answering a steady stream of letters to the contact form, you may want to simply give users more information in an accessible place.There are services that combine not only the function of knowledgebase, but also provide phone support (e.g. freshdesk) or email ticketing (e.g. zendesk). And of course this and much more at an additional cost.
But why pay if Magento has a wonderful built-in capabilities for this? Create a knowledgebase using a system of linked CMS pages – and you get the same capabilities, save the overall design of the site and, more importantly, make users stay on your site. The matter will remain for small – to make the knowledgebase accessible by posting links to it where it might be needed.
If we talk about providing the best service in the channel, it would be nice to allow users to comment on pages of knowledgebase, to create some semblance of community for solving problems and sharing of experiences. In particular, you can use Facebook comments for this purpose as the fastest way to implement the comments for these pages.
A blog can be also an excellent reference source. You can read about the benefits of a blog for e-commerce site here.
Phone
Phone call is the fastest way to answer customer questions. In addition, the more expensive the purchase he makes is, the greater is his desire to clarify all the details on the phone.
In addition, if the user is faced with a problem when purchasing and called to you – you can take his order and process it with the ability to create orders from Magento Admin Panel.
However, it can be quite tedious if you provide your personal phone number. We recommend to have a separate command for this purpose, as well as to use the service like Grasshopper or 800.
Conclusion
When you create a customer care service, remember that to be successful in this you need to take care of the breadth and completeness of the services provided, of the speed and of the quality of response to treatment of users – it affects on whether the customers are more willing to come back to your store for new purchases.
