6 Conversational Customer Service Types in Ecommerce Business

Think about it like this – you’ve got a secret tool that could propel your ecommerce business far beyond your competitors. It’s called conversational customer service, and it’s a game changer.

This modern method of customer communication is taking ecommerce to new heights. It comes in six different forms – live chat, chatbots, messaging apps, social media, email, and voice support. Each one provides a unique way to connect with, satisfy, and keep your customers.

But, how can you make the most of these methods? What are the top strategies for using them? And the big question is, how can they transform your business?

We’re just getting started, so get ready to find out.

Conversational customer service in ecommerce business comes in six different forms: live chat, chatbots, messaging apps, social media, email, and voice support. These methods provide unique ways to connect with, satisfy, and retain customers, ultimately transforming the business. Implementing these strategies can significantly enhance the satisfaction, loyalty, and relationships with customers in the ecommerce venture. By integrating omnichannel inbox management, businesses can streamline communication across various platforms, ensuring that no customer inquiries are missed, regardless of the channel they choose to use. This unified approach enables teams to respond more efficiently, providing a seamless and consistent customer experience, crucial for brand reputation and long-term success.

Key Takeaway :

The conversational customer service types in ecommerce business include:
1. Live Chat
2. No-Code Chatbot Builder (Automation)
3. Communication Channels like WhatsApp and Messenger
4. Email Support and Ticketing Systems
5. Social Media Support
6. Self-Serve Portals

What is Conversational Customer Service?

Are you interested in boosting the satisfaction of your customers, encouraging loyalty to your brand, and cultivating lasting relationships in your ecommerce venture? It might be time to check out conversational customer service.

So, what’s this all about? Essentially, it’s an engaging way of supporting customers, using tools like live chat, messaging apps, chatbots, and voice support.

This isn’t your run-of-the-mill customer service that only provides answers to questions. It’s about creating meaningful conversations with your customers. It’s not about automated replies, but rather offering immediate, personalized help based on what each customer needs or wants, and their past interactions. We’re not talking about generic replies here; conversational customer service uses relevant information to give tailored responses, which can enhance your customer’s experience and loyalty.

What’s more, with the potential to be available around the clock, this approach satisfies the modern customer’s need for instantaneous support. With the integration of natural language processing and automation, it can swiftly deal with up to 60% of repetitive tickets, which lets your team concentrate on more complex issues.

6 Conversational Customer Service Types in Ecommerce Business

If you’re into online retail, you know how much customer service matters. It’s all about making the shopping experience better, right? And what better way to do this than through interactive communication methods?

Tools like real-time chats or simple chatbot builders can do wonders for your customer interaction. But don’t stop there! There are so many other cool ways to engage with your customers.

Here’s a thought – why not use popular platforms like WhatsApp or Messenger? Or maybe even old-school email support, or engaging through social media. Experiment with different avenues and watch as your customer service game goes through the roof!

1) Live Chat

Live chat is like your online shop’s friendly assistant, always ready to help customers on the spot. It’s like a digital handshake, making customers feel welcomed and valued. This tool is a game-changer for ecommerce businesses, offering real-time, text-based support that turns customer service into a delightful chat.

1. Quick and Easy: With live chat, customers get the answers they need right away. No waiting, no delays.
2. Multitasking Friendly: Live chat is a blessing for those busy shoppers who love to do multiple things at once. They can chat and shop at the same time, making the whole process fun and relaxed.
3. Saves Money: Live chat is a powerful tool that can juggle multiple customer inquiries simultaneously. That means you won’t need as many customer service agents, saving you money.
4. Customized Service: With live chat, every conversation can be tailored to the customer’s needs. It’s a great way to make customers feel special and encourage them to keep coming back.

Adding live chat to your online store is a smart move. It’s not only good for your customers, but it’s also good for your business. It’s a win-win solution that’s worth considering.

2) No-Code Chatbot Builder (Automation)

Interested in taking your ecommerce business to a new level of efficiency and customer satisfaction? Consider the benefits of using a no-code chatbot builder. This tool uses advanced technology to interact with customers just like a human would, instantly replying to their questions and concerns. This advanced chatbot even understands natural language, so it can react to customer requests in real time.

One of the best parts? This chatbot builder doesn’t require coding knowledge, making it easy for anyone to use. Plus, it automates those repetitive tasks, like answering the same question over and over again. This means your customers get immediate replies, and your support team gets more time to tackle the tough issues.

In short, a no-code chatbot builder can seriously boost your ecommerce business. It offers superior customer service that’s available 24/7, a major win for customer satisfaction. It gives your team the time and freedom to focus on what matters.

3) Communication Channels like WhatsApp and Messenger

Incorporating Desku Automate with popular messaging apps like WhatsApp and Messenger elevates customer service by offering real-time, accessible support. This approach enhances engagement, ensures convenience, boosts visibility, and enables personalized communication, fostering trust and loyalty in ecommerce businesses.

With Desku, you can integrate WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger so that you can navigate all the communication platform customer queries under one roof.

4) Email Support and Ticketing Systems

In the fast-paced realm of online shopping, good old email support and ticketing systems are vital for handling customer queries and sorting out problems effectively. These systems are like your personal assistant, helping you keep all your customer interactions organized and easy to track.

Think of it like this – a customer raises a support ticket, and boom! An automated reply is sent, letting them know that their problem has been noted and will be dealt with shortly. It’s a nifty feature of email support and ticketing systems that makes your customer service feel like a friendly chat, cutting down on wait times and leaving customers happier.

The secret sauce? Detailed, carefully crafted email responses that turn generic conversations into one-on-one chats. By using these tools smartly, your online business can boost the customer experience.

5) Social Media Support

Social media support is like a lively chatroom where you can connect directly with your customers. It’s like having a real-time conversation and it can really give your ecommerce business an edge.

1. Chatting away: Through social media, you can strike up a conversation with your customers, answer their questions in a snap, and build a more personal connection.
2. Making the sale: When you respond quickly and in a personalized way on social media, you’re likely to see an uptick in sales.
3. All in one: Tools like Gorgias help you keep track of your social media support along with other customer service channels, making sure your customers get the same great service wherever they interact with you.
4. Seeing results: Cody Szymanski from Shinesty points out that being social can really boost sales.

6) Self-Serve Portals

Think about this – what if there was a handy tool that allowed your customers to find information all on their own? This is exactly what you get with self-serve portals in the world of customer service.

When you add self-serve portals to your ecommerce business, you’re providing quick answers to the most common questions customers have. And if they need more detail, you can point them to helpful articles. They can check out these portals on various platforms, making it a user-friendly and easy-to-use option.

Not only does it improve your customer service, but it also becomes a key part of your customer support game plan, guiding customers back to your main website and reducing drop-offs.

How Do You Implement Conversational Customer Engagement?

If you’re keen to bring conversational customer engagement to your ecommerce business, there are a range of routes you can take. Live chat, messaging apps, chatbots, and voice support are all effective tools, creating an interactive hub for your customers to get quick, efficient answers to their questions. The result? Happy customers, a loyal following for your brand, and potentially, more sales.

Here’s a simple four-step guide to getting conversational customer engagement up and running:

1. Go multi-channel: Remember, your customers are all different, so it makes sense to use a variety of platforms to reach them. Websites, mobile apps, messaging apps, and social media all have a role to play. It’s all about making life easy for your customers.
2. Go automatic: Not all customer queries need a human touch. Automating responses to common questions frees up your team to tackle the trickier stuff. Plus, it means quicker replies for your customers – always a win.
3. Go all in with your team: Your support agents are on the front line, so give them what they need to do a great job. The right tools and information can help them provide personalised support, even when dealing with high volumes of queries.
4. Go personal: We’re not talking about prying into your customers’ personal lives, but using the data they give you to tailor your support. It’s about making every interaction feel like it’s just for them – because it is.

There you go, in four easy steps, you’ll be well on your way to a conversational customer engagement strategy that works for your business.

Map Your Customer Journey

Understanding your customers’ journey with your brand is crucial for enhancing engagement and personalization in customer service. By mapping out the path from initial awareness to loyal advocacy, businesses gain valuable insights into customer interactions and preferences. This knowledge enables the identification and improvement of potential pain points in the customer experience, allowing for tailored strategies across marketing, sales, and service efforts. Streamlining customer interactions and ensuring a consistent experience across all platforms can significantly boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Focusing on the customer journey shifts the emphasis from product-centric to customer-centric strategies, fostering a more unified and satisfying customer experience. This strategic pivot not only enhances customer engagement but also contributes to business growth. Taking the time to deeply understand the customer journey is essential for developing effective conversational customer service and building a customer-oriented ecommerce business.

1. Uniformity of Experience: When you offer a multi-channel experience, it’s like giving your customers seamless, personalized customer service across various channels. This helps to strengthen their relationship with your brand, encouraging them to come back for more.
2. Uninterrupted Conversations: Your customers can start chatting on one channel, then pick up where they left off on another, without missing a beat. This level of ease and convenience can really boost customer satisfaction.
3. Convenience for Customers: Being available on various channels that your customers frequently use shows them that you’re there for their convenience. This can really enhance their overall interaction with your brand.
4. Quick Response Times: A multi-channel approach means you can answer customer queries swiftly, no matter the platform. Fast responses not only sort out problems quicker but also help to create a positive experience for the customer.

Incorporating a multi-channel strategy into your customer service approach is a great way to improve your customer’s online shopping experience.

Use Context to Deliver Personalized Customer Interactions

Building strong customer relationships is about more than just offering multiple channels for communication. It’s about truly understanding each interaction to provide personalized service. By knowing a customer’s history and preferences, you can have meaningful conversations and offer tailored solutions.

This approach creates a deeper connection with your customers, fostering loyalty and satisfaction. Integrating your online store’s technology helps agents quickly understand and meet customer needs, making support more efficient and making customers feel valued and understood.

Help Customers with Frictionless and Effortless Conversations

To take your online business to the next level, it’s vital to make sure your customers can talk to your customer service team without any hassle. This approach, known as conversational customer service, is all about making your customers feel like they’re being heard and appreciated.

Take a look at these four helpful methods for making customer conversations simple and smooth:

1. Interactive Channels: Think about setting up a live chat, messaging apps, or even voice support. These tools can respond to customer questions quickly and effectively, improving their overall experience.
2. Interaction Personalisation: Use the information you have about your customers, their likes and dislikes, to tailor your responses. This can help in building stronger bonds with them.
3. Automate the Mundane: Think about using automation tools to deal with frequently asked questions. This will free up your team’s time to deal with more complex issues.
4. Accessible Across Channels: Make sure your service can be reached through various platforms like websites, mobile apps, and social media which can cater to different customer needs.

How to Implement Conversational Customer Engagement? [7 Steps]

If you’re looking to step up your customer engagement game, we’ve got some important steps to think about.

It’s all about bringing everything together, handling routine questions efficiently, and getting to those high-priority issues as fast as we can.

Let’s discuss how these components can help you deliver an exceptional customer service experience.

1) Centralize customer interactions with a helpdesk

A helpdesk is your one-stop shop for dealing with customer queries and concerns. It gives your support team a clear picture of all customer interactions, which cuts down on time and boosts efficiency.

Here’s how you can make it even better:

1. Bring Your Tools Together: A helpdesk like Gorgias comes with a whopping 65+ integrations. It’s like having a toolbox that’s always ready for action.
2. Tackle Repetitive Questions: Add rules or Macros to speedily respond to repeating questions. It’s like having an automatic reply system that never tires.
3. Deal with Urgent Matters First: Set rules that automatically bring urgent tickets to the front of the line. Your customers will appreciate the quick response.
4. One Spot for All Interactions: Keep all customer interactions in one place. It’s easier for your team and makes the experience smoother for your customers.

Follow these steps and you’ll be well on your path to excellent customer engagement. It’s about making things easier for everyone, and these steps are designed to do just that.

2) Automate repetitive queries

So, you’ve got all your customer interactions in one place with a helpdesk, right? That’s great! Now, let’s talk about taking it a step further.

Have you ever thought about automating the answers to those questions that pop up time and time again? It’s a nifty way to speed up your customer service process and give your team a little breathing room.

Think about it. With automation, your team can knock out those repetitive questions in a snap, making more room to tackle the trickier ones. And the best part? You can use ready-made answers or pull from a knowledge base to keep things consistent and fast.

This not only speeds up the whole support process but also makes your service better quality by cutting down on human mistakes. Plus, it means you can get to those urgent issues faster, letting your team zero in on fixing them.

3) Prioritize urgent tickets automatically

Putting a system in place that can single out and prioritize urgent tickets can really smooth out your customer service process. It can also boost your customer’s happiness quite a bit. This is a key part of a winning customer service strategy that feels like a real conversation.

1. Spotting the serious stuff: You need to decide what makes a ticket urgent. This could be the type of problem, how valuable the customer is, or how quickly you need to respond.
2. Making ticket prioritizing automatic: Your customer support software should be set up to automatically bump up any tickets that meet these urgent criteria to the top of the list.
3. Giving your team a heads up: Make sure your team gets notified when an urgent ticket comes in, so they can jump right on it.
4. Keeping an eye on things: Keep a close watch on how well your support strategy is handling urgent tickets, and make any needed changes.

In plain English, this means you’ll be able to deal with urgent problems more effectively and keep your customers happier.

4) Route tickets based on agent specialization

It’s a good idea to assign customer service tickets based on the specific skills of your agents. This way, your staff can give more precise answers, making conversations with customers more meaningful. It’s like matching the right tool to the right job.

It’s a win-win situation – your customers get the help they need, and your service process becomes more efficient. But to make it work, you need to know who’s good at what.

When customer service becomes more of a conversation, it can really help build customer loyalty and grow your business.

5) Empower agents with rich customer data

Giving your agents access to detailed customer data can really make a huge difference in how they handle conversations with customers. This key move allows your agents to deliver personalized and efficient support in your online retail business.

1. Data in one place: When you gather all customer interactions in one place, like a helpdesk, it gives your agents a complete view of the customer’s history and their preferences.
2. Customized Answers: With the help of customer data from your online retail tech tools, your agents can give responses that are more specific to the customer, enhancing their overall satisfaction.
3. Quick Help: Access to detailed customer data gives your agents the context they need to solve problems efficiently.
4. Active Involvement: By having access to customer data, your agents can provide proactive support even before a sale is made, which improves the overall customer conversation experience.

Give your agents the power of detailed customer data today and see your customer engagement reach new heights.

6) Provide proactive pre-sales support and engagement

Imagine having all your customer data at your fingertips. It can change the whole game, right? That’s just one way you can take your customer engagement to new heights.

Another way is by being proactive with your pre-sales support. You know what they say, ‘prevention is better than cure,’ and it applies to customer service too.

Think about it. If you could predict what your customer wants and address it before they even ask, wouldn’t that make their shopping experience smoother? It’s about making the first move, reaching out, and making your customers feel seen and heard.

One way to do this is by centralizing your customer interactions. A helpdesk can be your best friend, keeping all your customer interactions organized and easy to access. And it’s not just about the convenience; it also means you can provide personalized service because you know your customer’s history.

And hey, we all get tired of answering the same questions over and over, right? So why not let automation take care of it? Set rules or create Macros to handle common queries and ensure your customers get fast and consistent responses. Plus, it frees up your time to focus on more pressing issues.

Speaking of pressing issues, prioritizing urgent tickets should be a no-brainer. It streamlines the sales process and ensures that urgent matters don’t get lost in the shuffle.

Lastly, make sure you’re using your team’s skills to the fullest. Route tickets to agents based on their expertise. It’s not just about getting the job done; it’s about getting it done well.

7) Make it easy for customers to engage with agents

Creating a smooth and easy engagement process for customers is a key part of conversational customer service. It involves offering various ways for customers to connect with your service agents with little to no hassle.

Here are some steps to make this happen:

1. Start by gathering all customer interactions in one place – a helpdesk. This makes it simpler for your agents and customers to have effective conversations.
2. For those repetitive queries, turn to automation tools like rules and Macros. This way, your agents can use their time on more complex issues.
3. Make sure you’re automatically giving priority to urgent tickets and directing tickets based on your agents’ areas of expertise. This way, the right person is always dealing with the right issue.
4. Give your agents access to detailed customer data. This boosts their capacity to give tailored conversational support that really hits the mark.

Examples of good conversational CX

Let’s chat about some brilliant examples of conversational CX.

Have you heard about brands like Unilever, Unicef, and Bolt? They’re doing amazing work in their respective fields.

It’s worth taking a look at their methods and strategies. It could help you improve your customer service conversations.

How cool is that?

Unilever

Unilever is a standout when it comes to top-notch customer service. They really know how to make customers happy and keep them coming back for more. Let me break down their strategy for you:

1. They’re Everywhere: You can find Unilever on live chat, messaging apps, and social media. They’re always ready to talk, no matter where you are.
2. They Know You: Unilever gets to know you and what you like. They make sure their products or services match your needs.
3. They’re Always Available: Got a question? Need help? Unilever is there for you 24/7.
4. People Love Them: Customers are so happy with Unilever’s service that they’re telling their friends. That’s a sure sign that they’re doing something right.

So, that’s how Unilever wins at customer service. By being everywhere, knowing their customers, being available round the clock, and earning lots of love from them.

It’s a simple but effective strategy that other businesses could definitely learn from.

Unicef

When we talk about customer service that really hits home, UNICEF has nailed it. They use a blend of technology and heart, like chatbots and messaging apps, to give their customers an experience that’s second to none. But hey, they’re not just any business – they’re an ecommerce business. They show us how to use various forms of interactive customer service to make customers not just satisfied, but downright loyal.

Their secret? They put their customers front and centre. Every conversation and every interaction has a personal touch that leaves a lasting impression. It’s not just about selling, it’s about building trust and forming connections that stand the test of time.

Other ecommerce businesses could learn a lot from UNICEF’s playbook. By adopting their approach to customer service, businesses could see a spike in customer satisfaction and loyalty. After all, who doesn’t want customers who stick around for the long haul?

Bolt

Bolt is a brilliant player in the ecommerce field, using a mix of interactive tech and natural language understanding to give top-tier customer support on a variety of platforms. This method not only makes customers happy but also helps to deepen their connection with the brand, leading to lasting customer relationships.

Want to know more about what makes Bolt’s model so effective? Here are four main benefits:

1. Swift, tailor-made replies: With Bolt, customers can expect quick and individualized responses to their questions, which can really boost their overall satisfaction.
2. Boost in loyalty and profits: Bolt’s focus on making customers happy seems to be paying off. As it turns out, satisfied customers often come back for more, which is good news for the company’s profits.
3. Money-saving automation: Bolt uses automated systems to deliver efficient customer service. This means their team can spend more time on important strategic jobs.
4. Available on multiple platforms: Bolt’s customer service isn’t tied down to a single channel. It’s available on a variety of platforms, showing Bolt’s dedication to being convenient and responsive to its customers.

Conclusion: Make a Conversational Customer Service Game On Point

Customers are seeking to have a personalised customer experience so that they feel at home and have a high chance that they will make repeated purchases. You surely need the right kind of tool that helps in providing personalised conversation to customers.

Increase the efficiency of the team, and leverage the unified inbox for gathering customer queries and resolving them faster like no one.