3 Customer-Centric Behaviors to Bring Into a Support Center

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At the heart of every successful ecommerce customer experience is a support center filled with service agents. Support agents are often the only human-to-human contact customers get with brands, so how they interact and engage with shoppers is paramount to brand affinity.

To maintain an effective customer experience, there are a few handy insights that brands can put into direct action. By practicing these three customer-centric behaviors, smaller, newer ecommerce companies can embody the same characteristics that bigger, well-known brands do. The upside? Happier customers that drive loyalty and long-term value.

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Customer-Centric Behavior 1: Be Present

Customer support availability seems like an obvious goal for your customer support agents, but without the tools to be truly responsive across channels, customers will fall through the cracks. This can result in longer wait times, disgruntled customers, and issue duplication. That’s why the best modern support platforms offer multi-channel and cross-channel access so customer support agents can be more agile with their responses and meet the customers on their preferred channels.

Sometimes younger brands simply can’t be everywhere, but two key channels to consider expanding into are SMS and chat. Younger demographics especially prefer SMS as their channel of choice, rising in popularity as much as 30% in the last year.

Automated chat in particular can answer common questions without requiring a customer support agent’s attention. Quick reply features within the chatbot window give customers real-time action options to solve issues and move them along through the shopping process.

If younger companies can maintain a people-centric attitude when using these message-based channels, they’ll be present for much of their key demographics while also being active on the channels most prone to quick turnover.

Customer-Centric Behavior 2: Be Personal

The best customer experiences are noted for their personalization, something ecommerce support centers of all sizes should strive to offer. While more intricate uses of customer data require big budgets, there are some savvy approaches growing brands can take in order to provide a personalized edge.

The key here is finding a way to make the data instantly accessible to customer support agents. This level of individualized support is only possible if you have tools that collect, store, and quickly call upon data in real-time via customer profiles or pages. Over time, brands can progress by using automation support and analytics, but to start, a strong knowledge base is crucial.

Customer-Centric Behavior 3: Be Proactive

A misconception for smaller ecommerce brands is that their support centers should exist just to field baseline needs and requests. In reality, the most sophisticated support centers are reactive and proactive. In fact, companies of all maturity levels can be proactive and achieve customer-centric behaviors through their support teams, especially in ways that can increase ecommerce revenue opportunities.

Having a presence in the right channels and adding the ability to close purchases within those channels helps customer support agents complete sales and upsell even faster. Beyond that, customer information is a roadmap into how these shoppers behave and make purchases. If your customer support agents are trained to identify those shopping trends and approach upselling opportunities appropriately, they’ll be set up for success.

Prioritizing Customer-Centric Behaviors on Your Support Team

Getting your support center up and running is a huge accomplishment for a fast-growing ecommerce brand. But as growth continues across the organization, companies need to make sure their customer experience keeps up the same pace. By prioritizing customer-centric behaviors like the ones above, savvy and agile businesses can make headway against their competitors and start really standing out as fan-favorite brands.

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