How To Improve Your E-Commerce Shop’s Customer Support With SMS

A good customer service experience can make or break someone’s opinion of a brand. A good experience can almost guarantee repeat business, and a bad one can drive even the most loyal customers away from a good product.

Sounds like a lot of pressure, huh?

The good news is, perfecting your text message customer support approach is easier than you’d think. Thanks to its ease and efficiency, generating positive customer experiences with SMS is practically fool-proof.

To show you just how simple it can be, we’ll explain three different ways you can use SMS to enhance your e-commerce customer support team.

1. Using Triggers to Answer FAQs

Self-service is a growing trend when it comes to online customer support. People want the quickest fix possible, which is why chat bots continue to grow in popularity.

However, chat bots, either on social media or through a third-party app, require internet connection or added navigation by the customer. It also often requires you to log in, refresh, and check these apps for incoming customer support requests.

Instead, why not resolve questions with a simple texts? The customer can get their answers by texting right from their phone (no internet or downloads required). And as a support rep you can automate responses to solve common issues without even lifting a finger.

It’s all possible thanks to triggers. We’ve already made a video explaining how you can set up SMS triggers, but we’ll break it down with an example below if this is a new concept for you!

Let’s pretend we’re an online meal delivery service called Eat Natural. Here’s how we might use triggers in our customer support strategy:

1. First, we would make a list of frequently asked support questions.
2. Next, we would create a keyword that customers can text in for customer support inquiries. Let’s say: NaturalSupport
3. In our keyword auto-confirmation message, list out the subsequent trigger keywords they can text in to receive answers. For example:
   • Thanks for contacting customer support! For pricing reply COST, for account issues, reply ACCOUNT, to connect with a team member reply TEAM
4. Then, create a trigger response for each keyword. You can create unlimited amounts of triggers to answer follow up questions, essentially creating a chat sequence as you normally would when answering a customer inquiry. At the end, you can always provide instructions for reaching a team member if they still need help!

With triggers, your customers get their issues resolved right away, and you save countless hours managing incoming customer support requests!

2. Use Texting to Send Order Updates

Customer service isn’t always about answering questions. It’s also about providing a thoughtful and enjoyable customer experience.

The bread and butter of all e-commerce shops is online orders. So, as a way to anticipate customer needs and provide a smooth ordering experience, you can use texting to communicate all order updates.

Here’s how it could work:

1. Edit your order forms so customers can enter their cell phone number. Be sure to include a checkbox indicating their permission to receive SMS order updates, and acknowledging that message and data rates may apply.
2. Integrate your texting platform with your online shopping program (like Shopify) through our Zapier integration.
3. Build out a “zap” that triggers a text message with order status updates when an order is placed. Through Shopify, for example, you can customize the frequency to send when an order is placed, changed, delayed, shipped, and more!

Online retailers like Amazon have started using texting to send shipping notifications, pre-order alerts, backorder notifications, and general product updates. With such positive customer responses to these communications, it’s no surprise that other businesses are following suit!

3. Add a Click-to-Text Button to Your Site

With just a little bit of code, you can add a button to your website that opens a text message when clicked. Here’s the code:

<a href=”sms:186645041851“>Send us a text!</a>

Just replace the number with your own. Every SimpleTexting account comes with a text-enabled number capable of sending and receiving texts.

The code above will generate a plain hyper link, like this one. However, you can also apply the link to a more stylized button. There are plenty of free options for creating an HTML/CSS button such as bestcssbuttongenerator.com.

But no matter which method you decide to use, business texting is undoubtedly the future of customer service communication.

Your customers will be excited to have such a smooth and clean-cut communication portal to meet their needs, and you’ll be managing incoming requests with unparalleled efficiency.

When it comes to e-commerce, the customer is king. And nothing helps you serve them better than texting.