Developing a Customer Service Team for Shopify

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During the early stages of developing your Shopify presence, substantial preliminary work will set up your ecommerce business for success. Between creating a branded site, establishing your SEO presence, and giving your products the showcase they deserve, the early stages of building your shopper experience can feel daunting. As the work on your site solidifies, the next big step to take is to develop your customer service team, who we aptly call “heroes.”

Your customer experience is as precious as your brand itself, and properly training and equipping your first support heroes will be fundamental to how your business matures over time. Luckily, some key steps to achieving the best possible results include identifying and tracking the proper performance metrics and using powerful software like Gladly’s to make your heroes’ jobs even more effective.

Perfecting Your Customer Service Process

Developing the members of a customer service team is a constant, fluid process that needs to be able to evolve as your CX team expands alongside your business. The customer service platform you use to train your heroes will need to feed them the necessary information on your company and products. It’s also important for your heroes to have access to metrics that help measure their performance while teaching managers and decision-makers how to finesse that process by indicating points of success and areas for improvement.

Depending on how you want to run your customer service center, there are several different metrics you could emphasize. For instance, you can focus on conversation quality at an early stage. In some contexts, longer call times indicate a potential area for improvement, but if you’re focusing on relationship building, duration paired with positive feedback from customers could better reflect your goals. Just as important as choosing the metrics to pay attention to is picking the technology you use to track it. A customer service platform like Gladly’s transparently reports performance to your heroes so they can translate insights into action items.

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Bolstering Self Service and Automation

The first members who lay the groundwork for your customer service team will need all the help they can get to handle anticipated customer volume. Therefore, investing in tools for automating as much as possible enables your heroes to provide solid support while empowering customers with effective self-service.

You can tailor responses to handle as much of the FAQ-level support as possible through automated services like chatbots before looping in a hero to address more complex issues or inquiries. However, leaning too heavily on automated responses can create cumbersome situations for customers, leading to a worse experience overall.

A support platform like Gladly’s will help your team tackle the basics, so those first Shopify heroes feel like you’ve set them up for success. Such platforms include tools that can deliver personalized responses based on the customer’s needs, for instance, fulfilling an order or providing a refund. Another Gladly capability is its conversational, collaborative AI that keeps customers at their cart when asking questions, so the shopping experience isn’t interrupted.

Empowering Heroes for Growth

The foundational tools and training you provide your heroes with are essential for onboarding them, but it’s equally important to clear a path to grow with the company and help drive revenue.

The key to your customer service team’s development is using tools that give your heroes deeper knowledge of shoppers, helping them build a consistent approach to customer support. These insights let them know when and how to drive revenue, understanding opportune moments for upselling and cross-selling. Helpful tools like Gladly’s customer details and scalable knowledge base open up a well of customer profile insight to your heroes, empowering them to proactively generate revenue opportunities.

As your Shopify business grows and shows those early jolts of success, prepare your heroes to support your business during the influx of shoppers and keep the customer experience seamless. With key insights into performance measurement and a strategy that fosters growth, you’ll develop a positive culture that drives long-term value with happy, well-taken-care-of customers.

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About Gladly

Gladly is a customer service platform for digitally-focused B2C companies who want to maximize the lifetime value of their customers. Unlike the legacy approach to customer service software, which is designed around a ticket or case to enable workflows, Gladly enables radically personal customer service centered around people to sustain customer loyalty and drive more revenue.

The world’s most innovative consumer companies like Godiva, JOANN, and TUMI use Gladly to create lasting customer relationships, not one-off experiences.

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