Bigcommerce Customer Support - 4 Best Practices
BigCommerce Customer Support - 4 Best Practices
Online sales are growing at a faster pace than ever, and brands have finally begun to truly embrace a customer-first approach. Consumers are more willing to buy new products via new channels, and are taking chances to try new brands at unprecedented rates. And, whether it’s the Shark Tank effect, BigCommerce’s scalability, or just a rise in entrepreneurial spirit, more people are starting more companies today than ever in the history of the world.
Last year, eCommerce sales saw a staggering 44% plus increase. Surprisingly, that surge is being led today by the SMB and mid-market, not the enterprise space - as it had been for the first 15+ years of online sales. These emerging/hyper-growth brands have overtaken large enterprise retailers in terms of their contribution toward total growth.
Customer Support is an Opportunity to Create Loyalty
Customer support agents for online retailers spend most of their day playing “swivel chair” between eCommerce, customer service, shipping, payment and loyalty platforms. The explosion of online sales is being compounded by a nearly 1.5x rise in return rates. This combined hyper-growth of sales with the exponential number of post-purchase inquiries (along with crippling post-COVID labor shortages) has created the perfect storm of opportunity.
Coming up with (and producing) an incredible product, and developing an amazing online store, is only half the battle. Consumers will only remain loyal to a brand that treats what happens after their purchase as equally important to what happens before. The need for an intuitive, highly scalable, post purchase experience solution remains glaring. And AI/bots are simply not the answer - great HUMAN connections matter more than ever.
Human connections begin with your customer support team for your BigCommerce store. Here are four best practices to improve your BigCommerce customer support post-purchase experience:
1. Customers mean more than the sum of their Tickets
Knowing your customers is vital for providing exceptional customer support for your BigCommerce store. Does a customer prefer email over phone calls? Do they tend to buy from a certain category from your store?
Knowing communication and product preferences empowers your customer support agents to communicate in a fashion that is most comfortable and relative to customers. agnoStack's unique Advanced Order Timeline provides you with contextual relevance of when a ticket was opened in relation to order, shipping and payment related events.
Other details such as how long a person has been a customer, customer tags, and available store credit also help to provide personalized customer support. agnoStack allows you to quickly access and edit Order Notes and Customer Notes as well as access any customer messages left on an order.
The Zendesk Support for BigCommerce connector by agnoStack provides customer support agents the ability to view Customer Tags, Customer Messages, available Store Credit, and much more at a glance directly inside of Zendesk with our Customer Insights module.
2. Efficiency creates happier, loyal customers
First call resolution rate and resolution time are common metrics to measure customer support performance - and for good reason. This is simply because the faster an issue can be resolved, the happier a customer will be and agnoStack helps agents provide the fastest path to the best post-purchase experiences in the industry.
The first step to resolving customer support requests is finding information related to the request. Commonly, the information to be found relates to order, shipping, or payment statuses. Other times, customers may ask about transactions or order items.
agnoStack's fullscreen Saved Orders Watchlist provides a customer-first view of support! You agents can now organize their orders they need to keep an eye on into custom groupings allowing you to easily identify and watch related items (New Customers, Awaiting Shipping, VIP/Repeat Buyers, etc.).
3. Find the issue - and take action immediately!
Looking up answers in your Knowledge Base to help offload Customer Support requests can be huge, but reading tips can often take just as long as just helping your customer resolve the actual problem - if your team has the right tools to make commerce support easier.
The BigCommerce by agnoStack Zendesk Support connector provides customer support agents the ability to have keystroke level instant access to sort, page and filter through hundreds of orders for each customer within seconds. agnoStack also adds the ability to quickly search by email address, search by name as well as lookup orders by number even without knowing the customer's email!
agnoStack provides comprehensive details for orders including order, shipping, and payment status, transactions, line items information, discounts, and refund and cancellations breakdowns.
In addition to relaying information to customers, BigCommerce customer support agents may often need to take actions based on requests, such as Order Modification, process Refunds or Cancellations, or even New Order Capture. When customer agents are able to take immediate action on requests, first call resolution and resolution time improves.
The Zendesk Support for BigCommerce connector by agnoStack provides customer support agents the ability to directly modify order items and shipping addresses, issue fixed and custom percentage and dollar amount refunds, cancel orders, and even rapid re-order or create an order on-behalf of (order capture), accessing your full product catalog to provide a fully PCI-compliant checkout flow available directly within Zendesk!
4. Never forget to get back to a customer
If actions cannot be taken on the first call, customer support agents will need to remember to follow up when possible. Keeping track of tasks can be difficult when agents have several tickets to follow up on. With the Zendesk Support for BigCommerce connector by agnoStack, customer support agents can effortlessly keep track of follow ups through Reminders and the Orders Watchlist.
Reminders allow agents to create multiple reminders for an order as well as manage all order reminders in a single spot. Effortlessly view and update all current and upcoming reminders by accessing the bell icon displayed in the top navigation bar.
Agents can also create reminders that are not tied to orders right from the top navigation or our fullscreen Advanced Reminders view. Never forget any details for a follow up! You can enter a date, time and priority as well as a short description for reference. When a reminder is due, you will receive a notification within the agnoStack plugin to remember to follow up and directly access the related ticket/order.
