Improving Customer Service For Dropshipping: 7 Best Practices In 2024
In today’s eCommerce world, great customer service is really important, especially if you’re running a small online shop or dropshipping business, getting repeated orders will be the key to win. Nearly 60% customers want expect better services during their online shopping experience, around 30% of them stopped buying from this brand if just had one bad experience, now you can see how important it is.
Why customer Service for dropshipping so important?
Brand Loyalty: Happy customers leads to repeated orders and loyal ones, their trust will build a connect web which more powerful than google or Facebook Ads, more important, it’s free. Building brand loyalty is slow and difficult path, but once it’s done will be enough strong to be destroy.
Reviews Matters: Good reviews attract new customers, while bad ones can easily push them away, it’s important to keep customers satisfied so they leave positive feedback. Too many complaints will lead temporary or permanent blocking of your store consider Paypal and Facebook have strictly assessment mechanism, once money locked, store banned, end of game.
Ahead of Competitors: In dropshipping world, angry customers will easily run to your competitors, people choose businesses that are known for good customer service, many big brand are spending lot of money maintain good customer relationships, word of mouth keeps them standing No.1 in their market field.
No matter which online store you are building, the following 7 customer service improvements for dropshipping will make you easily understand and utilize in your business.
7 ways you shall practices to improve customer service for dropshipping
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Respond faster!
Time is the money, fast response show a positive attitude to customer. 60% bad review from customer came from super delay and even 0 response, they need to be hear and care!
Setting Expectations
Timely responses make customers feel important and increase their trust in you. Aim to respond within 24 hours whenever possible. Many times, customers don’t mind if you can’t solve their problem immediately, but it’s crucial that you’re there to listen and respond promptly.
Organizing Matters
What do we do if there are a mountain of questions need to be replied? don’t panic! Try to organize these question before dealing with. Always prioritize handling the important but non-urgent ones first, then second important but urgent ones. Finally non-urgent and routine matters, like when a customer asks for order tracking number, clearly they can easily find on their order.
Monitoring Response Times
Always keep an eye on your response time and try not to keep any customer waiting for too long. Periodically review all customer services contact ways (email, live chat, social media etc.) which customer may make their complaints to ensure that no one have been overlooked. But if you respond late inevitably, remember to start talking with an apology!
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Make customer easy to find you
We need to optimize all customer services contact methods by following ways to ensure they can provide their feedback promptly:
Contact Us Page: This is the primary channel for customers to get in touch with you. You can display your company’s email address here for customers to contact directly (we recommend using contact@ or customerservice@yourdropshipping.com) with business hour . Also you can provide an option for customers to leave their email instead, which is suitable for those with non-urgent inquiries.
Order Page: The majority of customer complaints came from orders! Therefore, the quickest way to help customers resolve issues is to include our contact information on the order page. This allows customers to reach out to us immediately if they got any problems with their orders.
Track My Order: We can simply use free dropshipping app insert in shop website, allowing customers to check the status and location of their shipment. This will save you a lot working time!
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Varied contacts methods
Based on customer preferences, we can offer various contact methods on our website:
Email: The most classic yet timeless method! It’s the least intrusive way of contact, everything can be documented, making you easy to organize. But if you don’t open it, you’ll never see questions! So, remember, occasionally check your email for customer service, don’t forget your spam folder.
Live chat: This is probably the most favored among some people—direct and fast. It’s almost face-to-face talk can bring each other closer. Remember to be mindful of your words, try to soothe angry customers instead annoying them again, they are just want their problem solved sooner.
Phone Number: When a customer has an extremely urgent issue, making a phone call is the best way to go. However, remember that customers call because they want their problem solved in the shortest time possible, not to spend another fifteen minutes explaining them. This requires professional staff training for customer service, also support phone line must be separate. There’s nothing more frustrating than unreachable phone.
Social Media: We don’t suggest let customers share their thoughts on social media unless it’s positive feedback. In internet age, social media takes crucial position. When other ways of reaching us fail, social media is where customers turn to vent. It’s risky. Yet, when handled well, it can be free advertising.
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Introduce everything before customer ask
If we put ourselves in the shoes of a new customer, what questions might they asked before buying? what questions might they asked after buying? By anticipating and lines these questions proactively, we can provide answers to their concerns even before they ask.
About Company: Spend effort to showing your brand and company on the website by display real photos and videos, show real address and contact way to dispel customer doubts and build trust.
About Product: On the product page, provide detailed information about specifications, parameter, features and packaging. Supplement with videos introducing product usage instructions, maintenance guidelines, and more.
About Shipping: On Shipping Policy Page, you can provide shipping for customer services overview. If you are cable of shipping globe, show customer estimated delivery days for different countries. Also listing potential reasons for shipping delays, also how many days will be delayed because of that. This should cover most of the shipping-related questions customers may asked.
About Replace& Refund: When customers get defective goods, they need to know if they meet the conditions for refund or replace and what information they should provide. Replace& Refund Policy Page can assist them well. Typically, customers are required to submit order screenshots (including order number and order email address), photo or videos of wrong/defective/lost parcel, screenshots of unusual shipping update etc.
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Take advantage of automation
Auto-responses program can reply some simple questions, such as order delivery times. You can achieve this by pre-editing customers frequently questions and listing answers in advance, triggering response when customers ask relevant question. To keep the auto-response up-to-date, you will need to gathering customers’ questions monthly to make sure it can still cover most questions they might have.
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Build professional after-salesteam
Using automation and artificial intelligence can definitely help customer services for dropshipping, but it can’t replace all works of after-sales team. After your company grows and increase to great sales, don’t forget to invest bigger customer support team. A professional customer support team can reduce complaint rates and hold customers. However, if you don’t have that much budget right now, online support is a more cost-saving option. Nevertheless, you must find a way to monitor how they works, reporting and summarizing work regularly and optimizing work methods.
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Handle complaints gracefully and humbly
Don’t treat complained customers as enemies, instead they are the best way to let you see your deep issues, to turn them as improvement:
- quality issues = change better supplier
- currently delays = change to more reliable shipping methods
- damaged parcel = change to better protective packaging
Never reject any opportunity that can help your customer service improve. If you don’t receive enough feedback, consider seeking opinions actively by offering new product information or coupons, to see if you can do better and better.
Final Words
This is a sharply competitive world, we understand many dropshippers wants to supervise, they choose focusing on ultra-low prices as their competitive edge. However, they overlooked something more obvious—-meeting customer needs by listening and understanding their requests.
We hope this article can inspires you and help, also welcome any question and opinion you may have, just feel free to leave feedback in the comments section below. As CreativeDrop member, we are dedicated to providing excellent service to each customer by finding satisfying solution and services here.
