To succeed, a company must meet the bar set by its competitors, and one of those barometers is providing excellent customer service. The importance of this factor increases while running a business online.
A reputable online retailer with ambitious market share goals can afford almost anything except for one thing: a single unfavorable customer review. For this reason, we have compiled this comprehensive tutorial covering all aspects of dropshipping customer service.
After reading this guide, you’ll have a better grasp of why customer service is mission critical for a successful dropshipping business.
Now, let’s get this party started.
Service for dropshipping clients is known as “customer service.”
When dropshipping, customer service entails responding to questions, concerns, and comments from buyers. It’s a service that helps clients with any question they may have about their orders or the site in general.
Dropshipping involves more than just selling a product; offering excellent customer service is crucial to the success of your business. Just said, if you provide excellent service to your consumers, they will become dedicated patrons.
Can Dropshipping Exist Without Customer Support?
Yes. If you have a dropshipping store, you will almost certainly be inundated with questions and comments from your consumers.
This is especially the case if your business involves dealings with Chinese customers or using AliExpress or similar services to source products.
Why?
This is due to the fact that your clients cannot be certain of the following.
How honest your web shop is
The genuine appearance of goods
Instructions for Use
Shipping estimates by region
How to trace a package
Indication of when precisely the goods will be delivered.
In order to determine whether or not they should give their financial information to your online company, some clients may prefer to speak with a human representative. They would essentially just “ping” the customer service department to see whether they got a real response.
Customers will likely wish to get in touch with your company’s customer support department. For this reason, it is of paramount importance to a dropshipping company.
What Happens If a Dropshipping Company Does Not Provide Customer Services?
The true goal of online commerce is not to gain new consumers, but to retain the ones you already have through upselling and cross-selling.
Bad customer service can cause as much as a 40% drop in sales for a company in the United States. All other regions in the world are subject to the same conditions.
Low Quality Service to Customers
Therefore, giving first-rate customer service should also be a priority if you don’t want to see a decline in your clientele.
Converting a potential consumer into a paying one is much more challenging than keeping existing customers happy. That is the secret to having a profitable dropshipping business.
In certain cases, dropshippers would even give customers a full refund while letting them keep the item they originally ordered. By doing so, they hope to keep their consumers happy and build a solid name for themselves in the e-commerce sector.
What Are the Best Ways to Handle Customer Service in Dropshipping?
These customer support methods are tried and true and work with any dropshipping platform.
Contact Us Page
A “Contact Us” page is a must-have for any legitimate dropshipping business. In its most basic form, this is just a place for customers to enter their email address and any questions they may have. After receiving a similar message, you respond via email.
By “email,” we mean “domain email.” In this case, it would look like this: contact@storename.com. Doing so would instill trust in your company’s authenticity among your clientele. When clients contact you via email, you’ll respond them using the same address.
Live Chat
Live chat is a relatively new addition to many types of websites, including e-commerce sites. This also applies to shopping on the internet. You can find equivalent apps on Shopify and plugins for Woocommerce.
In order to participate in the live chat, you need not be immediately available at all times. To keep customers satisfied while you’re away, program the live chat app to provide automated responses and let them know when you’ll be back online.
Phone Number
Live chat is a relatively new addition to many types of websites, including e-commerce companies. This also applies to shopping on the internet. You can find equivalent apps on Shopify and plugins for Woocommerce.
In order to participate in the live chat, you need not be immediately available at all times. To keep clients satisfied while you’re away, use the live chat app to provide automated responses and let them know when you’ll be back online.
Social Media
The use of social media and drop shipment are natural partners. In order to connect with current and potential clients, you need social media profiles that bear your company’s name.
Each of your company’s accounts needs its own social media presence. You’ll need it to advertise your business, get more people involved, get product reviews, and communicate with your clientele.
You should model your customer service like, if not better than, that of established dropshipping companies.
How Do You Minimize Customer Service for Dropshipping?
Despite appearances, satisfying client needs requires significant investment of time and energy.
A reputable dropshipper will take every precaution to limit their customer contact via email. If a client has any questions or concerns, he will need to get in touch with you. Therefore, you should provide all details to your customers to ensure they have no questions.
How to Deal with Your Customers is outlined below.
Be Proactive
To anticipate client needs in advance is to take a proactive stance. Consider your items from the perspective of the people who will be buying them. Try to anticipate any concerns or doubts that a buyer might have and address them head-on through your website.
A proactive approach also includes giving clients the data they are likely to seek. Customers may inquire as to the status of their ordered goods.
Sending out periodic emails updating customers on the whereabouts of their products and the status of their purchase can help you avoid them having to repeatedly ask you for this information.
Provide a Detailed Description for Your Products
Many inquiries can be preemptively answered by reading a detailed product description. Make an effort to elaborate on the product’s features and benefits in a written description.
Go for it if you feel a video would be helpful in describing your product. Include a “how to use” instruction on your product page if it is technical in nature.
It is important to include information about any regional differences in product specifications in the product description. For the charger of an electrical device, for instance, you may need to code in a variety of adapters to accommodate use in various countries.
Provide Product Reviews with Photo and Video Reviews
If you provide photos and videos of previous customers using your product, you may eliminate most of the questions customers have. Customers are more likely to make a purchase if you combine the greatest photographs of the product with thorough feedback.
Provide a Q&A Section for Each Product
Having a questions and answers section on your website is crucial for relieving the pressure of constant consumer inquiries.
The addition of a questions and answers section invites customers to contribute to user-generated content (User Generated Content). We need more user-generated content and fewer emails from customers.
It’s a good idea to put a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page or faq on your product page to help address customer concerns.
Can You Outsource Your Customer Services?
If you run a busy dropshipping business, you may not have time to personally address each customer’s concern. Since this is such a time-consuming and important task, it is best to hire a virtual assistant or freelancer to handle customer service in your stead.
There are a variety of approaches to take. Upwork and Fiverr are two examples of freelance marketplaces where you can find a reliable virtual assistant or freelancer to employ. Freelancers on these sites tend to be very competent and have experience in similar work.
If you want to hire the right freelancer, you should check out their ratings and see what kind of work they’ve done in the past.
You can find comparable services from other, less expensive organizations.
Why Do Dropshipping Stores Care Less about Customer Service?
One common misconception about dropshipping businesses is that their primary motivation is to maximize short-term profit. Service to customers is not a priority for them.
The question is why. Many dropshippers sell a wide variety of products from several online retailers, and they either don’t have the resources to provide adequate customer care to each of these stores, or they assume that if their clients become dissatisfied with one of these stores, they can simply open another.
This is the wrong way to go about things. It’s not easy to make a living by dropshipping. A significant investment of time, energy, and resources is required to create an online store, launch the products, and attract customers.
Not every retail problem can be solved by opening a new shop. To stand out and win loyal consumers, you must give exceptional service.
What Apps Can You Use to Provide Better Customer Service?
Shopify and Woocommerce both provide a number of useful tools that can improve your support processes for customers. There are both premium and free options available for these apps.
You can start out with the free versions of the apps for dropshipping and then upgrade to the paid versions once your business starts making money.
Here are the three best Shopify solutions for handling customer care for your dropshipping business as an example. These are no-cost apps that will improve your company’s customer service. You’ll also learn about the apps’ primary functions.
HelpCenter
Frequently Asked Questions
Live-chat and ticketing capabilities
Tidio
Chatbots that can automatically respond in real time during live chats
AfterShip Order Tracking & SMS
You can check the status of your order by using the Order Lookup, Tracking Page, and Email Updates.
Does Shopify Handle Customer Service for Dropshipping?
No. Shopify does not handle customer service for dropshipping or any other kind of online business. Shopify’s own customers (shop owners) have access to customer support, but Shopify does not handle support for your customers.
However, Shopify does offer some assistance in this area. Shopify gives you one email address at your domain name when you start a dropshipping store.
Whenever a consumer places a purchase for one of your products, Shopify will send them a confirmation email using an address within your domain.
Your client will think that you sent this email, but in reality Shopify is handling this for you automatically.
You can only send and receive emails from that address. You don’t have access to the inbox, and you can’t make any personalized outgoing emails from that address.
You can only enter your other email ID as the forwarder in Shopify so that you can have the email from your customer that was sent to the same email ID that Shopify had provided you.
Can You Automate Customer Service for Dropshipping?
Yes. This is a great method to streamline your dropshipping business’s customer care operations. It’s a crucial aspect of dropshipping automation.
Inevitably, when your dropshipping company grows, you won’t be able to keep up with the volume of work on your own. To put it simply, you wouldn’t have time to do everything that needs doing. As a result, it’s imperative that you develop methods of automating the process.
Communication with customers is now fully automated.
The following are methods you can use to automate your dropshipping business’s customer support.
Use Automated Customer Service Apps
In addition to the previously mentioned tools, there is a plethora of other customer service apps available.
Make use of such time-saving apps today.
Hire an Assistant for Customer Services
You, as the business owner, might have the means to staff your online shop with customer service representatives or outsource this function entirely. If he’s well-trained, he’ll be able to respond cordially to every question.
A virtual assistant or freelancer can be hired instead of a local assistant if financial constraints prevent you from doing so, as was discussed before in this article.
Set up Automated Replies
In addition to saving time, setting up automated responses streamlines the customer support process as a whole. You can’t be there for your clients 24/7/365 to address their questions. Emails and social media accounts might have automated responses set up.
For example, “Thanks for contacting our organization” is a simple and effective template for an automated response. Our regular business hours are Monday through Saturday, 9 am to 5 pm. We promise to respond as quickly as we can.
Set Up a Ticketing System
The use of automated ticketing systems has recently become popular. Customers who contact you via email will be assigned a ticket number.
In the future, they can use this number to reference this conversation when corresponding with your customer service team. This appears highly competent, giving customers confidence in the quality of service they will receive.
What Is the Best Dropshipping Customer Service Template?
The following elements should always be present in every response template or reply you use while providing customer assistance.
Responding to consumer emails with “thank yous” is a must.
Be sympathetic to their predicament or question.
Put your money where your mouth is and show them how much they mean to you.
Try to maintain an air of seriousness.
Assure them that finding answers to their questions or fixing their issues is your number one concern.
Let’s imagine a consumer is complaining to you that he did not receive the items he ordered. Consider the following as a model for a helpful customer care email.
“We appreciate you reaching out to us, (customer name).
If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We sincerely regret that your purchase did not match the description.
Fixing this problem is currently my number one priority. Let me talk this over with my colleagues, and I’ll come back to you with an answer that will make you happy.
Thank you for your consideration,
A Name
Name of Your Business”
You can use a variety of templates, tailor each one to a specific set of circumstances, and distribute them to your support staff.
What Are the Pros of Good Customer Service in Dropshipping?
Excellent service to customers has only positive outcomes. In the case of drop shipping, this translates to increased profits. Here are a few of the benefits you can anticipate to gain from focusing on customer satisfaction.
Support for the clientele
The following are some examples of excellent customer service professionals.
Cross-Selling of Products
The success of a general store likely depends on its ability to sell a wide variety of products. If you provide excellent service to your customers, they will return to your online store and likely buy more of your wares.
In order for this to happen, he must have been wholly content with the preceding goods and the service he received.
Email Marketing
One of the most effective methods of product promotion is email marketing, which is inextricably tied with stellar support services.
If clients are unhappy with your service, no amount of email communication will make up for it.
Repeat Order
An effective product has an aftereffect. Excellent service to customers always sticks in their minds. When a customer receives a product that can be used in multiple ways, he is more likely to make additional purchases.
Maintain an exclusive position in the minds of your clients such that they can’t imagine shopping somewhere else for the things you offer. Achieve this goal by focusing on giving exceptional service to your customers.
Word of Mouth
If you can get people talking about your product or service, you’ll make more money than you ever imagined. How? It travels quickly through social networks such as families and friends.
If a dissatisfied customer saw that you had the guts to refund their entire purchase, word of mouth advertising would spread about how great of a company you are. Even if granting a refund cost you a customer, you would still make money.
Great Genuine Reviews
Providing first-rate service to your customers will negate the need to gather recommendations from third-party sources. Because of this, there would be no need for apps like “Product Reviews” that aggregate user feedback from various sources.
If your customers are pleased with their purchases, they will be more likely to give you honest feedback about your products.
Less Return and Refund Requests
You can expect fewer requests for returns and refunds if you are able to respond to client inquiries in a timely and pleasant manner. When an online transaction goes south because of a disagreement between the buyer and the seller, the best course of action is to find a compromise that works for both sides.
A good measure of customer service is how rarely consumers ask for a refund or return.
Fewer Chances of Getting Banned
If you start your consumers, it might spell disaster for your dropshipping company. Stores, their associated social media pages, and payment gateways like PayPal may be temporarily or permanently shut down if they receive an excessive number of customer complaints.
Therefore, if you want to avoid being banned, you should prioritize satisfying your customers.
Higher Brand Recognition
In addition to improving the public’s opinion of a company, providing excellent customer service is a surefire way to boost sales. The beginnings of brand development are seen when consumers feel safe making purchases from a company. All the well-known companies, including Amazon and eBay, attained their fame thanks to the excellent support they give their customers.
Final Words
In the face of competition from behemoths like Amazon and eBay, every new client is a boon for dropshippers. You can’t afford to fire him for nothing more than poor service to customers.
After reading about how important customer service is in dropshipping, you may feel that your business will die without it.
If you’re already aware of the significance of customer service in dropshipping, we hope this guide has helped you learn more.
