March 29, 2022

How To Automate Your E-commerce Customer Support With Confidence

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Did you know that 68% of customers are willing to spend more on a product or service from a business with stellar customer support? That’s why top businesses invest a fortune in their customer service.

Unfortunately, not all businesses have the capital to hire a comprehensive customer support team.

However, thanks to new technologies like machine learning and the like, they don’t have to hire customer support staff. Instead, they can automate their customer service and take care of their customers with little human intervention. That makes for a better customer experience.

This begs the question, how can businesses automate their customer support to streamline their customer service?

That's an excellent question, and we have all the answers you need. In today’s post, we’ll be highlighting a few ways online businesses can automate their customer support effectively.

Use Auto-Reply for Orders and Return/Refund Requests

Customers placing orders may have one or two questions that revolve around the same phrases. The same goes for customers returning their orders or asking for refunds. Some of these common phrases include:

  • Where is my order?
  • When can I expect my order?
  • How do I ask for a refund?
  • How do I use the product?

Most of the phrases follow these lines or revolve around the same subject matter. It’s your job to identify these key phrases and use autoresponders for the customers’ queries. The right software will help you identify these phrases and create automated responses to them.

Employ Self-Service for Customers to Easily Find Answers to Their Queries

When customers have questions about your products or services, they go online. That’s because it’s one of the quickest ways they can get answers to their queries. By implementing a self-service platform on your website, you’ll be helping your customers help themselves.

For proper self-service, you first have to identify all the common questions your customers have. These questions can revolve around your specific product or anything closely related. Next, provide an answer to all these questions on your website’s self-service platform.

There are plenty of ways to incorporate a self-service segment into your website. Here are some of the best:

Help center articles: Try creating a self-help page consisting of articles that’ll help them find answers to their questions. These articles may include “how-to” articles, instructionals, and detailed product descriptions.

“Getting started” emails: These are emails that clearly explain how customers can use the product from the moment they open the box. They follow a sequence and slowly guide the customer from knowing nothing to fully understanding the product.

A FAQ section: Create a frequently asked questions section on your website for questions that users commonly ask. This section should be on your landing page so customers don’t have to do too much work to get the answers.

A self-service widget: Place a self-service widget on your web pages. We recommend placing it at the bottom of every page to make it easier for customers to find. This widget should lead your customers to various self-service resources to get the answers they need.

Categorize Customer Tickets Based on Keywords and Phrases

Having to rummage through numerous tickets to categorize them can be too much work for the average person.

A much better alternative is to use keyword identifiers to put tickets in their appropriate categories. That way, you can tag tickets for a particular set of concerns in one category and others in their respective categories.

Not only is doing so a lot easier, but it also eliminates human error. Furthermore, It allows you to respond to your customers a lot faster than if you did it manually.

Schedule Calls When Customers Leave Abruptly

Sometimes, customers get frustrated when they don’t get the answers they need fast enough. This leads them to abandon their shopping carts or leave the website. You can let them go, but you better believe they won’t be coming back anytime soon.

To prevent losing a precious customer, consider using an automated call and following up on the matter. When the customer picks up the phone, furnish them with recorded options through the dial pad. Customers are likely to find their answers in these recorded options.

Always have a dial pad option for speaking to a customer support representative. Sometimes these options may not solve the customer’s problem.

Use Live Chat With Canned Responses: Prompt Customer Service

About 75% of millennials prefer texting to talking to someone over the phone. In fact, most of them communicate through various social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp

The best way to serve this demographic’s queries and complaints is through live chat. Customers can type their queries or requests and get an instant response.

The best part is that you don’t need to have an actual person chatting with the customer. You can use canned responses or chatbots to do that in place of customer service representatives. These days, conversational AI is so advanced that people can’t tell whether they’re talking to a real person or a computer.

Leverage this technology to your advantage and boost your customer support. Apart from your website, you can use chatbots in your official WhatsApp contacts and on other social media platforms with live chat.

Utilize After Purchase Responses

It’s never a good idea to leave your customers in the dark after they purchase an order. After they do so, you should send them automated responses, like a thank you email, for starters. Later on, you can send details about the purchase, including payment and shipping details.

These responses will answer a lot of queries that customers have after buying a product. Also, let them know of the various ways they can contact you in case of any questions.

Automate Your Customer Support Today!

Start streamlining your customer support with the right automation tools. Learn more about how we can help you take your customer service to the next level.


Are you looking for new ways to improve your CX?

Our customer service solutions powered by conversational AI can help you deliver an efficient, 24/7 experience  to your customers. Get in touch with one of our specialists to further discuss how they can help your business.