Ecommerce businesses are losing revenue every day. Why? They underestimate how much value their customer service teams can have in their marketing efforts.
We work with ecomm businesses day in day out and the one transformative business change that has consistently led to revenue success is aligning marketing and customer service teams and integrating team processes. Here are just a few of the ways you can change your processes:
Customer service teams to improve your marketing data
If your customer service teams do not have processes set-up to glean info that can be used for marketing, then you are seriously missing a trick.
These teams are talking to customers every day and are able to seamlessly gather data that allows you to better target your user with more personalised messaging related to their interests, queries and product preferences.
We identified with one of our ecommerce client businesses that if we could gather a specific piece of data about their contacts that they had a +118% higher average lifetime revenue than those for whom this data was unknown thanks to clever personalised marketing campaigns based on that one data point. This led to us agreeing with the client that this would be a key goal and change of process for their customer service team. They have now collected this piece of data for 64% of their contacts which has made a big difference to the overall revenue driven by marketing.
What changes can you make to help collect this kind of data?
- Create playbooks or call scripts for your customer service team to use to remind the team about the questions they should be asking and the goals they are trying to hit. This allows team leads to review how effective the process is in gathering this data and make any adjustments needed across the whole team.
- Create email snippets (template paragraphs) that the customer service team can add into emails to new contacts to automate gathering this data.
- Update livechat automations to gather this data from new contacts landing on your site.
- Ensure you have team reporting set-up to illustrate how the team are doing in collecting this data to add a competitive motivation for the team and to reward and recognise where the customer service team are doing well in hitting data collection targets.
Customer service team to nurture & drive sales
As well as utilising your customer service team to improve data capture for marketing you can turn them into a mini sales arm for your ecomm business too by integrating them into marketing processes.
Here are few ideas for getting your Customer Service team to drive and nurture sales:
1. Personalised appointments
Create personalised appointments or consultations with your customer service team to encourage sales. Depending on the value of the products you sell, you might find that your customer appreciates a little more guidance before they make their purchase. This is why creating a process whereby customers can book meetings with your customer service agents via your website, ads or live chat to understand more about product specifications, styling and uses can be a brilliant way to help nurture conversions for your ecommerce business.
We worked to set-up this process with one of the ecommerce businesses we work with during lockdown and they now see between 50 and 100 appointments booked every month with a strong success rate. It has created a new revenue source for their business.
2. Cart recovery
Utilise customer service teams in cart recovery. We worked with an ecomm business to identify why carts were being abandoned and discovered anecdotally that their customer service team had received calls from older customers who found it easier to speak to someone to place their order. This led to us creating steps in our cart abandonment automation process for the customer service team to phone people to help them navigate the checkout and complete their order. We saw the rate of recovered carts increase from 19% to 50% after the new workflow and process was put in place.
3. Upsell
Engage your customer service team in upselling. Another tactic that we have found can lead to increased average order value is to send customers an email after they have placed their order just offering the option to add something into their order at the last minute by getting in touch with the customer service team. It has proven extremely successful for a business we work with and has helped to increase Average Order Value (AOV) for the business.
Use marketing to improve customer service quality & efficiency
As well as driving more revenue by integrating your customer service team into your marketing processes, you can also use marketing to increase the efficiency of your customer service team.
How can you implement that in practice?
- Create processes to encourage your customer service team to use marketing data in customer conversations and incorporate more personalisation to provide a better service for customers.
- Review patterns in your customer service reporting to mine for issues that marketing could solve. For example, you might look at what the most common enquiry categories are for your customer service team and then create a new FAQ page on your website which is also linked to as part of email automations and live chat to reduce the number of enquires that the customer service team have to deal with.
By aligning your marketing and customer service teams and creating integrated processes within your CRM you can create additional revenue opportunities for your ecomm business, as well as creating a more empowered team and a happier customer. Not sure where to start? We can help: Book a meeting with us at Attacat today.
