Sashank RavindranathThe Pivotal Role of Customer Support in Overall The Post-purchase CX
A staggering 40% of customer support issues are Shipping, Delivery, and Returns related issues occurring in the post-purchase phase of the customer journey.
The verdict is clear.
Businesses of every size, small or big, deal with order delivery issues, particularly when they use third-party shipping service providers (even more so during the Holiday season when order volumes are 3x-4x). Therefore, despite delivery issues occurring, one must find a way to proactively resolve them or at least mitigate their impact on customers before you lose them for good.
When these issues are handled right, your support team’s actions directly impact your CSAT scores and also delight your customers by surpassing their expectations.
However, if you unintentionally neglect the post-purchase phase, you are prone to face challenges that arise due to a lack of effective customer support in the form of:
- Running the risk of poor customer satisfaction
- Losing loyal customers to bad delivery experiences
- Brand’s online reputation taking a hit
- Spending time and money heavily on acquisition costs, etc.
The Holiday season is a time when order volumes are high and shipping carriers are straining to meet delivery promises, increasing the magnitude of the problem multifold during the Holiday season. That is why businesses must prepare well ahead for the Holiday season i.e right around the corner.
And the first step towards that is being aware of the challenges that your customer support team would face and equipping them to handle them with ease.
Customer Support Challenges During the Holiday Season
1. Lack of visibility or data for resolving issues proactively
My son is very disappointed that you can’t deliver his jersey on-time for his first @NHLFlyers game, even though I paid for 2-Day shipping. Your lack of effort to correct this issue is noted.
— evanwiener (@evanwiener) March 20, 2019
Customers during the Holiday season anticipate their orders with extra diligence. Thus, in case of unprecedented issues such as delays, make sure you proactively resolve them by employing expedited corrective measures in order to not let them feel let down.
Tracking your customers’ parcels in real-time helps you stay on top of delivery issues. However, if you’re tracking through your shipping carrier, then it’s important to keep in mind that:
- Shipping carriers more often than not do not provide real-time tracking of parcels and
- Shipping carriers are known to hide information regarding delays or other issues to prevent them from being shown in a bad light.
In either case, you end up not resolving issues proactively and settle for being just reactive. This is of little or no help to your customers who would’ve already been impacted by the issue and would have been put through a bad delivery experience.
2. Lack of effective customer communication while dealing with delivery issues
Snow Update: We know how important delivering your order is, even in bad weather so we'll let you know of any delays as soon as possible. X
— Coast (@CoastFashion) January 17, 2013
Not all delivery issues can be resolved. There can be uncommon issues such as weather-related exceptions. In such cases, at instances like these, it is best to proactively communicate the hurdle in place to your customer with empathy, and provide them with context.
If your customer informs you of the issue first and not the other way around, it creates an assumption that you don’t care about their orders and they start to consider shopping with your competitors for no fault of yours. This would also increase the volume of incoming tickets for your business.
On the other hand, being empathetic and preemptively notifying them of such issues, can help you win their trust and earn loyalty. Which is now a lost opportunity.
3. High support ticket volumes pertaining to order status
When I get a notification that my order has been dispatched? I go feral.
— sonka (@_soybeans) September 21, 2021
Absolutely foaming at the mouth.
Where is my package where is my package where is my package
Even when everything seems to go right with your customers’ orders, you can still face issues due to their impatience resulting from anticipation.
This sometimes leads them to bombard your support reps with WISMO inquiries. Repeatedly resolving these queries consumes all of your support team’s time and prevents them from doing their other tasks such as product-related queries.
To avoid this situation, you can notify your customers of their order status as they unfold across the delivery lifecycle and thereby increase your CSAT scores and reduce the number of support tickets created.
Knowing these issues is just half of being prepared to leverage a great customer experience. The crucial attribute lies in taking necessary steps and staying ahead of these issues. Let us look at how businesses can do it.
5 Ways to Leverage Customer Support and Win Big This Holiday Season
People expect fast replies from businesses. Many people are more willing to leave a bad review about a poor customer service experience than over a
— Andrew Spence (@AndrewSpenceIM) March 23, 2021
suboptimal product.
Live chat, FAQ's, robots, social media can all help with this.
Empowering your customer support team to properly address order-related customer issues can help you:
- Demonstrate a strong commitment to the high standard of customer experience you offer
- Show empathy towards your customers’ issues and
- Ultimately build a loyal customer base
Here’s how you can do just that.
1. Provide 24/7 customer support
Investing in a 24/7 support team cannot be overlooked especially in busy times like the holiday season. Even if you don’t have a customer base that spreads across geographies, 24/7 support can still help you reduce wait time and increase customer loyalty.
2. Create a proactive support workflow
Empower your support team to proactively resolve issues such as delivery delays, frequent WISMO calls, etc, and take preemptive action before such discrepancies impact your customers.
3. Provide your team with complete information
Enable your customer support executives with all relevant data regarding your customers’ orders to easily spot shipments that may require attention and enable them to intervene where necessary.
4. Reach out to customers via multiple channels
Email, SMS, social media, Google reviews, Yelp you name it; reach your customers there. Effectively engage your customers across all these channels to give your customers a sense of comfortability.
5. Make delivery and returns tracking self-serve
Automate responses for common queries and make order or returns tracking easy with zero interactions with your support agents. This frees up your team’s time and lets them focus on other important tasks like product-related queries or even help in upselling/ cross-selling.
Provide Firepower to Your Customer Support Team
A post-purchase and returns management solution such as LateShipment.com can help you stay ahead of support challenges by enabling you to engage your customers in ways that matter most with timely order updates and tools to help with proactive issue resolution via:
A dedicated customer support dashboard – Designed to
- Get predictive alerts for delivery issues
- Auto-trigger tickets on your helpdesk for 7 types of delivery failures and
- Enable agents with order tracking information from within your helpdesk for faster resolution
Shipping transactional notifications – Keep your customers updated on what happens in the post-purchase phase via
- Proactive identification and contextual communication with customers facing critical delivery issues
- Automated and customized order status notifications via email or SMS throughout the delivery lifecycle
Customer support and helpdesk integrations – Secure, seamless integrations with various platforms to
- Monitor parcels in real-time
- Proactively resolve delivery-related customer issues and
- Effectively engage with customers
A Returns experience management solution – That provides you with:
- A Returns portal and support user/ warehouse operator dashboards to make the returns experience fast and easy and drive quick returns request resolution
- A tracking page that provides complete transparency around return status and eliminates customer anxiety about the whereabouts of their package
- Proactive updates on returns to keep your customers in the loop of their order returns, etc.
Bottom line
We’ve said it before. Delivery issues such as delays are inevitable but let’s change the fact that they hurt your business.
Empower your customer support team to overcome the challenges we’ve discussed here, particularly during the holidays, and enjoy a great sales run.
Making use of a post-purchase solution such as LateShipment.com will strengthen the hands of your support team and help you stay in control of the post-purchase experience.
Ultimately, a business that is in control of its post-purchase will have a competitive advantage when it comes to both delighting and retaining its customers.
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