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12 minutes
Creating an online store is an exciting adventure, but the competition is tough...
... Especially when you know that 73% of consumers make the customer relationship a key element of purchase.
So, to stand out from the others and ensure the success of your e-commerce, the improvement of your customer relationship is essential.
How to seduce your visitors, satisfy your buyers and build customer loyalty?
SiteW provides you with all the tools to develop customer relationships that will make all your competitors green with envy!
When you have just opened an online store, it is essential to improve your customer relationship management (CRM). And to have good customer relations, it is important to know precisely where you stand regarding your business.
To do this, the technical aspects of your ecommerce website must be impeccably efficient.
In order to optimize the technical aspect, you must learn about the possibilities offered by the website design company you have chosen for your online business.
On SiteW, on the My Sites page, you can easily access all your transactions. Click on Blocks > Store > Orders to access the list of your orders.
So you quickly have access to your latest sales and you can manage all your orders easily.
You can filter:
your sales,
your purchase orders,
your invoices...
This allows you to be always aware of the transactions that take place on your website, and it is the basis for a successful customer relationship with an effective strategy.
Another important aspect that is complementary to invoicing is inventory management.
It goes without saying that good inventory management is an excellent asset when you have created an e-commerce site.
You need to be able to centralize all your products, on the dashboard of your online store. This way, you can offer a qualitative and reliable customer experience that reinforces the trust that your customers place in you.
With SiteW, you can manage your product inventory and easily get an overview of it.
On the My Sites page, click on Blocks > Store > Manage products to manage all of your inventory in one place.
If you have enabled the automatic stock management, the inventory is automatically decremented at each purchase.
You can choose the moment when it decreases: order received, paid or shipped in the parameters of the Store block. You can also access your sales by product, by clicking on Blocks > Store > Products orderedwhich makes it easy to analyze your sales and to see which products are your bestsellers and which are not profitable.
Now that you are sure that all the technical aspects of your ecommerce website are impeccable, in order to ensure good handling, let's move on to the strategy itself.
As the owner of an online store, you are first and foremost a customer of all the others that exist on the market.
And you probably have examples of this as a customer: the attitude of your contact in the company, in case of a problem with a product has an impact on your desire to deal with this store again.
Hence the importance of taking care of your attitude and adopting the right posture when it comes to solving problems.
It's not about being smooth and accommodating, nor is it about being rigid and unapproachable. The key lies in these three points to always keep in mind, to improve your customer relationship:
👉 Transparency,
👉 Expertise,
👉 And prioritization of needs.
Honesty and transparency are the key points of a successful customer relationship. By making transparency a core part of your brand, you reduce the rate of dissatisfied customers who will never come back to you.
Indeed, you will not be able to solve all the customers' problems, and you will not be able to communicate and find a compromise every time.
Customers will prefer you to be honest with them, by admitting that you cannot solve the problem, they will resent you for lying to them and giving them false hope.
This includes:
Making transparency a core part of your brand,
Writing down the steps your customer will have to go through,
Being able to tell the customer that you can't solve the problem, and explain why.
This way you build a customer relationship based on trust.
In fact, you include the customer in the process of solving the problem. To do this, you should clearly explain to customers the reasons behind your actions, so that they can understand why some operations take longer or cost more than others.
Remember that you have an online store: it is much easier to make yourself understood in real life than through a screen.
To facilitate communication and understanding, be sure to use very clear language, where no misinterpretation is possible.
In order to build the best customer relationship, customers shouldn't waste their time whenever they visit your website.
Avoid adding links to other sites, as well as using too many links to other pages.
You should know your team well, in order to know where to direct customers, if you aren't able to answer their question.
This means training your team to react to different problems, and identify the right interlocutors depending on the context.
The most senior members of your team probably know the quickest and most efficient ways to help customers.
Thus, try to surround yourself with a qualified and well trained team to answer their needs.
Depending on the size of your online store, you may face many different issues: from a simple question to a shipping or payment error.
To organize your time and not overload your team, make sure you prioritize the messages.
This task involves two steps:
You need to start by determining which issues have priority. They can be treated depending on the time needed to answer, or on the importance they have.
Then, to save time, you can also prioritize the answers depending on the channels. For example, messages received on social networks require a quick response from you. E-mails, on the other hand, can be processed slower.
You've got it: to take care of your attitude, you need to know your customers very well and offer them complete support.
This allows you to:
create a relationship of trust,
and save time.
Thus, the values you convey are clear, and there is no conflict but communication.
And, to combine form and content, we come to the next point...
To stand out from the competition with your online store, it is essential to personalize your customer relationship.
Your speech must be consistent with the image you project, and should be professional and effective in all circumstances.
Moreover, you also save a lot of time. You anticipate your customer questions because you know them by heart.
Finally, personalizing your customer relationship helps build audience loyalty.
But now how to build a custom CRM ?
To be able to personalize your customer relationship, you need to fully understand what your customers want from you.
To do this, nothing better than to analyze your exchanges with them:
Do they often ask the same question?
Do they have recurring problems?
How do they talk about your brand?
These elements will allow you to customize your CRM strategy. Try to use their own vocabulary and anticipate their problems to offer them complete support.
After this analysis, you can use two main elements to build good CRM on your website:
👉 Frequently asked questions
A FAQ section is a great way to anticipate customer queries. By answering recurring questions, you can create a good FAQ page.
This can be added to as your business grows.
Moreover, FAQ can also improve your SEO: you can add some keywords related to your niche., and thus optimize your organic SEO strategy..
Yes: your FAQ page is ready, you just have to customize it
👉 Chat bot
Chatbots are much appreciated by users, and allow easy interaction with the customers. They will lighten your workload: if they don't know how to answer a question or query, they will automatically redirect customers to human support staff or to online resources.
Speaking of online resources...
Adding a blog to your website allows you to personalize your customer relationship.
You can go into more detail about your business, explain how your brand works, and create an expert image.
Maintaining a blog can be time-consuming, but it will allow you to stand out from the competition and guide all customers through the buying process.
Just like the FAQ, the blog allows you to anticipate questions and deal with urgent issues. This way you gain efficiency and speed, while optimizing your SEO and improving your brand image.
💡 On SiteW, it is possible to quickly add a blog in a few moments.
With the Blog block, you can add a blog very easily to your website, and without worrying about its compatibility with your online store.
To know your customers better and offer them quality service, the best thing is to allow them to create a customer account.
This way, you enrich your customer file to accompany them better
The website builders, such as SiteW, allow you to have access to your customer database quickly and easily.
On SiteW, go to the My Sites page, by clicking on Blocks > Members. You have access to your customer database.
Indeed, any customer placing an order on your site is automatically added to your database. If you add a Member block to your website, your customers will be able to login to their account on your website and access various information about them:
their own order history,
the exchanged messages, if any.
the order form and all the order details (reference, amount, date, name).
Moreover, you can export an Excel file containing all the customer data from your site's dashboard, by clicking on Blocks > Store > Orders
It's an easy way to build up your customer database in just one click!
This also gives you the possibility to build loyalty among your customers. The database allows you to know your customers and thus to adapt your offer depending on your target. It also puts you in a position to easily send them custom email campaigns and create strong customer relationships with, for example:
Personalized emails for birthdays,
Gifts or promotions depending on their seniority.
This personalization allows you to lighten your team's workload and to concentrate on the major problems that your customers are facing.
If the FAQs, automated answers and articles are not enough, customers will contact your support team.
This usually means that their problems require an intervention, and can have an impact on your customer relationship.
Now let's study the issue of customer interaction, and what you can do to optimize your customer relationship in an emergency.
With all the tips above, you have been able to filter the customer's questions and prioritize their problems according to severity.
However, there are some cases that cannot be solved with a FAQ or a blog.
Your emergency responses are a key part of your customer relationships and will be a key factor in building customer loyalty.
Here are three essential aspects to facilitate the exchange and provide complete support to the customers in need.
Many customers are displeased when they can't access support, or when the process is too complicated.
The starting point is therefore to make it easier for customers to access support.
This includes a diversity of contact channels:
Phone number,
Email address,
Social networks,
Instant messaging,
Postal address
In addition, remember to highlight the means of contact, in all your communications.
However, offering many contact points implies maintaining them in order not to waste time resolving a problem.
Which brings us to the next point...
If you're looking to optimize your customer relationship, you probably know about the importance of omnichannel.
And for good reason because omnichannel should be at the heart of your strategy, and is essential for your CRM.
But what is omnichannel?
Consumers use several channels to contact a company, and each one has their own preference.
However, they expect the company to be present on each of these channels, with the same intensity and efficiency, so they can use a single channel.
If a customer has to contact you on social networks, then by email, then by phone and finally make an appointment in a physical store, they will abandon the process and have a poor image of your brand.
Making omnichannel a priority means focusing your strategy on the customer experience.
To do this, you need to build a customer database accessible to your team. This way, all demands are centralized in one location, and everyone has all the data they need to develop a quick and appropriate solution.
Finally, in order to provide optimal customer support, make sure it is in multiple languages.
You can start by adapting your CRM to Spanish, one of the most widely spoken languages in the world.
Finally, consider taking a look at your sales statistics to know exactly where the majority of your customers live, and translate your support documentation accordingly.
You now know all the basics of CRM, and how to differentiate yourself from your competitors.
But the secret to a successful CRM is consistency.
Here are some tips to maintain your customer relationship and keep your audience coming back.
It is uncommon for customers who are dissatisfied with the service or quality of a product to complain.
In fact, they just leave.
They convey a bad image of your brand, without you having been able to do anything to improve the situation.
To identify the problems that customers have when purchasing products and that they don't tell you about, it is important to carry out regular reputation monitoring.
For this, you can:
Search for your brand name on Google and social media,
Collect relevant and recurrent reviews,
Analyze these aspects to understand how to improve them.
You can also directly contact dissatisfied customers in order to propose to them a solution.
You have hundreds of people judging you who follow you and who would be willing to give you advice to improve your relationship with them.
So why not ask them directly?
To gather their feedback, you can:
Add forms to your site
Send, satisfaction questionnaires, by email,
Interact with your audience through social media.
Social networks are becoming more and more important in your CRM.
That's why you need to learn how to use them correctly.
Indeed, the best way to maintain a strong customer relationship and to develop your brand image is to use social networks.
There are many community managers who have become famous for their sense of humor.
Social networks allow you to create a special connection with your customers, and to open the communication if a customer faces a problem or asks a question to obtain information.
You've got it: social networks are essential tools to maintain and optimize your customer relationship.
Follow these 4 simple steps, work on your customer relations and you will be able to convince your prospects and make your customers want to come back!
Customer relationship is a key element for a successful online store. A good customer relationship allows:
to optimize the efficiency of your online store,
to improve the customer experience of your e-commerce,
to build customer loyalty.
Ready to stand out from competition with customer service? 🚀
Last update: November 15, 2022
