In this blog, we’ll dive deep into some of the customer service best practices for Amazon sellers, and how excellent service can lead to customer satisfaction – and therefore customer loyalty. In the digital world, where competition is rampant, it’s absolutely crucial to provide exceptional customer service in order to keep delighting your customers, and keep them coming back. Things like answering questions quickly, paying attention to customer wants and needs, and facilitating returns will go a long way for things like customer retention and acquisition.
In fact, according to this blog by Hubspot, brands that invest in customer service save more when it comes to customer acquisition costs. That’s because you reduce your customer churn rate when you deliver great customer service. If we follow the Pareto Principle, aka the 80-20 rule, only 20% of your overall customer base is responsible for 80% of your company’s sales. Understanding this, it makes perfect logical sense that babying your current customer by providing excellent service is one of the best ways to impact the bottom line.
Think about this within the schema of Amazon selling. Providing excellent customer service is crucial when you’re not the only one selling that product or service. Even if your private label is differentiated vs. the others, you wouldn’t be a success if you didn’t have some level of competition – that is, other sellers selling something similar. When you and your competitors are fighting over customer demand, set yourself apart from the rest by paying close attention to customer relationships.
Let’s explore customer service tips to employ in your Amazon selling journey. We’ll see how you can impact that bottom line in the most positive way through customer service best practices.
You might also be interested in developing a customer engagement strategy.
1. Customer Service Best Practices: Fast and Responsive Communication
Here comes the first of the customer service best practices: attending to customer concerns and customer inquiries as quickly and thoroughly as possible. Your goal should be to make every customer interaction the best possible experience through proactive customer service that prioritizes fast and responsive communication.
What exactly does this mean? It’s quite simple – make sure you reply to customer queries within 24 hours or less. Respond to customer complaints, questions, and concerns as quickly as possible – but make sure you actually answer their questions! High-quality customer service through quick, responsive, and thorough communication will prevent A-to-Z claims and maintain buyer satisfaction.
Now, understanding customer concerns isn’t easy when you’re selling in different time zones with different cultural nuances and languages. Letting this stop you from delivering excellent communication is a surefire way to augur bad customer service. The best way out of this is to use pre-drafted response templates on your website, translated in your customers’ languages, to answer frequently asked questions, and ushering specialized queries to customer service reps that can deal with customers in their native tongue. You could even program a customer service chatbot to inform the customer that human customer support agents will reply to their questions as soon as one becomes available, so the customer is aware that their concerns are valued by the company, and will be addressed accordingly.
Now, what about customer queries on your Amazon store? Amazon’s got its own Buyer-Seller Messaging Service, which you can access through the message center in your Amazon account. Now, Amazon’s got pretty strict communications guidelines; sellers are only permitted to contact buyers to complete orders or respond to customer service inquiries. The Buyer-Seller Messaging Service is the only authorized method for direct communication between sellers and customers.
The service provides sellers with key features:
- Reply to buyer inquiries: Respond to customer questions or concerns regarding their orders.
- View message history: Review all past communications with buyers for reference.
- Send attachments: Include necessary documents or product information to assist buyers.
All communications use encrypted email addresses to protect both buyer and seller privacy. When a buyer contacts a seller, Amazon assigns an encrypted alias to the message. When sellers reply through their personal or business email,. the system uses another encrypted email alias, ensuring anonymity and security in the communication.
Although it sounds a little strict, the Buyer-Seller Messaging Service ensures that sellers maintain professional, secure, and policy-compliant communication with Amazon customers.
2. Customer Service Best Practices: Handling Returns and Refunds Efficiently
The second of the customer service best practices is handling returns and refunds efficiently. Did you know that eCommerce businesses see 25% of returns, vs. 8% of brick-and-mortar stores?
Product returns usually fall into 3 categories, according to Ingram Micro Lifecycle:
Amazon also offers a return process to make it easier for customers to return and refund items:
- Customer Support and Returns: Amazon offers tools like “Frequently Returned” badges and Virtual Try-On to help customers make informed decisions. The platform provides free product support, exchanges, and replacements for eligible items.
- Convenient Drop-Offs: With over 8,000 return locations, 80% of U.S. customers have a drop-off point within 5 miles of their home, making returns easy and fast. Most refunds are processed within 5 hours of return.
- Inspection and Resale: Returned items are inspected and, if in good condition, resold as new or used, or liquidated. Electronics undergo additional testing and factory resets before being listed with clear condition descriptions.
- Donations and Recycling: Items that can’t be resold may be donated through Amazon’s nonprofit partners, like Good360, or recycled, ensuring minimal waste and maximum reuse.
So, one of the best ways to improve customer service is to communicate a fuss-free return policy, and commit to delivering the right product to the customer accordingly.
3. Customer Service Best Practices: The Role of Detailed Product Descriptions and Packaging
Here’s the 3rd customer service best practice: detailed product descriptions and packaging. During the customer journey, it’s wise to under promise and over deliver. What exactly does that mean?
Customer issues often arise when customers don’t understand part of the listing. Is your product complex, and difficult to operate? Make sure you have a detailed instruction manual – and consider putting condensed instructions in your image gallery. Make sure you clarify how large or small the item is, and offer several graphics that put the product next to common items like a mobile phone, laptop, or desk lamp to provide size comparison. Improve your customer service by managing customer expectations and stepping in front of objections before they happen. These are just some of the tactics you can employ to make sure your product descriptions describe your item as accurately as possible.
Don’t downplay the importance of accurate SEO, either! The key to getting the right customer, and keeping the Amazon algorithm happy, is to employ the right keywords. Read up on keyword localization and why it’s crucial when expanding to other markets.
If your reviews and returns show that your product is arriving defective or damaged, you might want to improve your product packaging. It’s not just a pretty box, after all; it’s protective material that will safeguard your product while it’s on the way to your customer’s home. Plus, you can most definitely make it pretty, to further reinforce your brand identity!
While you’re at it, learn how to make the perfect product packaging with translations!
4. Customer Service Best Practices: Building a Trustworthy Brand Through Customer Feedback
The 4th of the customer service best practices is resolving customer feedback. The key to making someone a loyal customer is to make sure they feel heard and acknowledged. Customer feedback is a great way to develop a relationship with the customer. That’s why it’s crucial that the customer service experience is as polite, tactful, immediate, and solutions-driven.
So, the first step to improving the customer experience through reviews is to encourage positive feedback. Product inserts can help in a big way here. It’s a subtle way of thanking your customer for their purchase, while gently encouraging them to leave a review. Make sure your product inserts are compliant with Amazon’s terms and conditions, though!
Second – your customer may leave less-than-stellar feedback. This is okay! You need to learn how to “fail forward.” That means looking at every setback as an opportunity for improvement. This is where customer service interaction comes in handy. Reach out to the customer and apologize for the mishap, and see how you can work together to improve their experience. Oftentimes, prioritizing customer feedback this way will turn a negative review into a positive one.
Third – use customer feedback as a tool to improve product offerings and service quality. Reviews are a great way to gather customer feedback on where you can change up your product to suit the market better, or address issues like defective and damaged deliveries. By paying attention to what your customers say about their experience, you’ll find that you’ll soon start to exceed customer expectations.
By following these steps, you’ll discover that your brand will grow to serve customer wants and needs in a much closer way. All because you provided the right customer service, and tried your best to enhance the customer experience. It’s a win-win situation!
5. Customer Service Best Practices: Provide a Customer Service Strategy on a Global Scale
Here’s the fifth of the customer service best practices – making sure that customer service is important no matter where in the world you may sell. You must provide the best service possible in all countries you sell in, even if you don’t understand the language, or you’re unfamiliar with cultural nuances.
For example, in Western countries, customer interaction is much more intimate. It’s not untoward to address your customer by their first name; it comes off as more personal, friendlier, and more trustworthy. On the other hand, Asian customers may find this practice too familiar, which is why they often prefer to be addressed by honorifics, to show respect. This phenomenon just goes to show that customer service practices may alter depending on the country you’re selling in.
Nevertheless, it’s imperative to deliver the best experience, while keeping cultural nuances in mind. A good way is to create a customer service strategy that your team can implement across all cultures, and see how you can automate as much of your customer service operations as you can.
It’s not rocket science: localize a chatbot to answer FAQs in your customers’ languages, then funnel more complicated questions to customer support reps that may speak the language – or at least manage to interact with the customer through excellent customer service skills. In an ideal world, you’d employ a multilingual virtual assistant that can provide customer care in the language your customers are comfortable in, but if this isn’t possible, then train your customer service team to communicate with customers in simple language, and approach every issue with a solutions-driven approach. The language barrier may cause some frustration, but if customers feel their needs are being met, they’re likely to overlook errors in expression.
These tactics may help you improve the overall customer experience here and there, but one thing remains certain: make sure the customer feels heard, seen, and understood in every market you sell in.
6. Customer Service Best Practices: Utilizing Amazon’s FBA Service for Consistent Support
Last but not least of the customer service best practices – one of the best ways to deliver great customer service is through timely deliveries. Amazon FBA has its own customer service department; it can handle inquiries on shipment issues, such as delivery status and logistics. It also handles inquiries on returns and refunds, and returns any sellable items back to your inventory.
That said, FBA doesn’t cover everything, so it’s important to have a customer service solution of your own that will handle product-related questions, manufacturing issues (such as defective items or needing replacement parts), and some return inventory – because FBA does make mistakes, and it’s the responsibility of a seller to make sure that returned items are properly accounted for and re-entered into sellable stock where applicable.
Using Amazon FBA will elevate your business’s credibility. It makes you look more trustworthy to customers. It’s probably a good idea to employ FBA in all, if not part, of your operations, so at least you don’t have to worry about meeting customer expectations with regards to logistics and shipping.
7. Final Thoughts: Great Customer Service is Key to Your Success
Hopefully, this blog helped you uncover the best customer service tactics to help propel your business! Poor customer service is a surefire way to tank a business, so make sure you conduct regular customer service training with your team, so you consistently meet those customer expectations.
It’s important to remember – customer service means “the assistance and advice provided by a company to those who buy or use its products or services” (Oxford dictionary) – but it can go much further than that. The level of service you provide to your customer service spells the difference between customer loyalty and an improved bottom line, and a business going under. In short, it doesn’t really matter how amazing your product is, or how well optimized your product listing is, or even how much external traffic you funnel into Amazon through your omnichannel marketing approach; what matters is how you nurture the relationships when you have the opportunity to.
Make sure customers feel seen, heard, and acknowledged, in every single culture you cater to. Be honest with your customers, and employ transparency and ethical business practices in all you do; when customers feel they can trust you to deliver on your promises, you’ll find that their levels of satisfaction increase.
Let’s wrap this blog up with a quote from James Cash Penney, the founder of J.C. Penney Stores. “Courteous treatment will make a customer a walking advertisement.” Elevate your customer by treating them with respect, courtesy, kindness, and gratitude, and you’ll find that they’ll walk away happy. When they walk away happy, they entreat their peers to buy from you, too. Isn’t that what we’re all striving for?
On that note, read up more on cultural competence, and how it can increase customer satisfaction.