Best Ways to Improve Customer Service for Vape Shops [Best Practices & Other Tips]

It’s essential to know how to enhance customer service levels to keep customers happy. Customer service gives you the chance to improve your customer satisfaction scores.

Even though most customers who contact customer service are unhappy with some aspect of their shopping experience, contact allows you to redeem yourself.

Table Of Contents

1. What is eCommerce Customer Service?
2. Why Customer Service Matters
3. Key Elements of Customer Service Strategy
4. What is a Customer Satisfaction Score?
5. Conclusion

What is eCommerce Customer Service?

ECommerce customer service is how a business assists customers throughout the online purchase process. This includes helping the customer with decision-making and resolving unexpected issues.

For your eCommerce vape shop, you should be looking at customer service as the primary communication mode between your business and the customer.

ECommerce customer service plays a huge role in customer satisfaction. It is the way you can create a seamless customer experience across channels and platforms.

Using the proper customer service practices is the deciding factor between a happy and an unhappy customer.

Why Customer Service Matters

In today’s fast-paced business world, customer service serves more purposes than just keeping customers happy. Although that aspect is also essential, customer services can be used as a competitive advantage if done right.

Especially in Online Retailing:

A business like an online vape shop where every other competitor can offer the same products that your vape store has in stock is an industry that prompts you to ask how to enhance customer service levels in a way that sets you apart from the competition.

Key Elements of Customer Service Strategy

Although uniqueness and creativity are welcomed in customer service, you can follow a few customer service improvement strategies to ensure that you provide the best customer service experience possible.

After you comply with the following critical customer service strategy elements, feel free to innovate and change it up a bit for your customer.

1. Know Your Customer Inside Out

You're probably starting your online vape shop with a business plan idea in mind. But if you're doing things correctly, most of the client's decisions will be made for you.

Remember, you're in the retailing business, and who knows better about what they want than the customer.

Knowing your customers inside out will help you make the right decisions for structuring a successful business plan, but it will also be essential when making customer service decisions. Knowing your customers well will indicate how you should communicate with them and what channels to use.

2. Provide Quick Feedback

If you’ve ever bought anything online and needed customer service from the online retail store you got your goods from, then you likely know how frustrating it is to not get feedback from the store quickly.

Sometimes, customers' frustration can be customer-motivated, but a fast reaction time can play a significant role in customer satisfaction.

If you don't provide quick feedback, it's also possible you'll lose customers who forget they're expecting an answer from you and end up buying from your competition.

3. Create Clear & Straightforward Online Catalogs

Customer service is not solely reduced to direct communication with the client.

A successful customer strategy does not focus on a single communication channel (which we’ll touch on later). A way to communicate with the customer is also through straightforward, easy-to-understand landing pages & catalogs.

If your customer already knows what they’re buying just by looking at your catalog, they might not even have to communicate with you directly. Having a clear online catalog to fall back on could turn out to be an essential part of a successful customer relationship.

Additionally, as digital purchasing keeps getting more popular worldwide, customers are increasingly shying away from direct communication and expect everything to have an online solution.

4. Provide All Necessary Product & Service Information Online

Keeping your customers informed doesn’t necessarily dial down to product information alone or to any information the customer sees before purchasing at all.

Once a customer has made a purchase, that person will want to keep tabs on how their merchandise is being handled and what step of the shipping process. Other information the buyer might be interested in includes last-minute offers, personalized bonuses, and follow-up emails on abandoned carts.

5. Give the User Different Contact Channel Options [Multichannel Strategy]

To look at the situation from the customer’s perspective, think about what device and platform you usually use to make purchases online. 

Even though you use your phone to make most purchases, there are many other devices you can use (pc, tablets, etc.).

Customers use various platforms to communicate with retailers. Automatized chatbots, live chats, direct calls, and social media are all viable alternatives.

The live chat option has gained popularity because it's immediate and straightforward. Customers are shying away from direct calls because these require human contact and chatbots because they are not personalized enough and can become frustrating.

A key aspect of excellent customer service is how to have good customer service on social media in today's modern world. Most customers learn about online retailers and sales through social media.

It only makes sense to communicate with them through the same platform you made the first contact with.

Another valid alternative has a strong FAQ landing page that is easy to navigate and answers all customer questions.

6. Provide Clear Shipping & Returns Terms

Customers want their purchase to ship FAST and FREE. They also demand easy-to-claim returns that don’t ask for paperwork to be filled out or tons of emails to be sent.

The last thing you want is customers to try and return items, so you cover your bases by providing clear-cut product information. But if a return is inevitable, the last thing you need is a frustrated customer who can’t return an item they don’t want.

This sort of situation bears heavily on your brand perception.

The same goes for shipping terms. You want to cover your bases and provide clear information about shipping costs and timeframes. This way, clients won’t become eager if they don’t receive their package before your promise date.

7. Use CRM & Help Desk Software to Track Customer Interaction

Interacting with customers is one thing. A very different one is to keep an easy-to-access and easy-to-understand record of how those interactions went.

If you know how your customers react to specific communications, you’ll know the best way to communicate with them going forward. A good CRM or help desk software ensures customers don’t have to repeat themselves when they need something.

If you’re not entirely sure what is an eCommerce help desk, here’s a quick 101:
An eCommerce Help Desk is software that allows you to manage customer interactions on multiple platforms or channels. It does so by grouping them into a single shared inbox that contains all order information and customer queries related to that specific order.

A CRM is a complimentary software that analyzes the information collected by the help desk and provides practical conclusions you can use to optimize customer interactions.

8. Invest In Website Design [Responsive Web Design]

Having a website that works appropriately is a must, mainly if you operate an online vape shop.

In the case of online retail stores, a well-designed website that’s easy to navigate is the equivalent of a brick & mortar store that looks appealing and is comfortable for incoming customers.

On that same note:

Because there are so many devices your customer can use to purchase something from your website, it’s essential to have aresponsive website design you can fall back onto.

9. Keep a Close Eye On Online Customer Reviews

Some customers will not contact your customer service agents and might leave their post-purchase interaction with your vape shop to online reviews. Leaving it up to you to make the first post-purchase contact.

Negative reviews could persuade other customers not to buy from your online vape shop. Addressing negative reviews and using that information to turn a bad experience into a good one could differentiate between a good and bad brand perception for that client and any future potential customers.

Addressing positive reviews is also something you could do to create a long-lasting bond between your vape store and the client, and it’s up to you how those interactions go.

10. Make the Experience Unique [Exceed Expectations]

You can start to get creative and offer features that competitors don’t. Exceeding expectations could mean having perfectly trained customer service representatives, compensating customers for a bad customer experience, or personalizing each purchase with a creative and unexpected gift for the client.

How unique your strategies are and the way you exceed expectations can be as creative as you want.

11. Assess the Need For Seasonal Staff and Plan Accordingly

It’s only natural that certain times of year account for most of the sales your vape store makes. When you have identified those high sale seasons, you will need to prepare in advance.

More sales likely mean more customer support will be needed, which you will not want to be short-handed for.

12. Train Your Employees

Hiring more customer support agents isn’t enough. You’ll need to make sure that the people who have the most significant impact on the shopper experience are adequately trained to interact with customers.

This might take a few weeks to do, so make sure you are preparing in advance and have put together a working training plan. Standard practices include having new hires follow experienced employees to learn from them before allowing them to talk to the client directly.

What is a Customer Satisfaction Score?

Customer satisfaction score or CSAT score is how you measure your customer’s satisfaction and get to learn the areas where you need to improve. CSATs are done by asking your customer to be a part of a short interview or complete questionnaire made with questions relevant to their customer service experience.

CSAT questions are usually drafted to allow the customer to rate their experience in specific customer service features from 1 to 10 (10 being the best). The final customer satisfaction score can be calculated by running an average between all the answers or doing a one-question survey asking the customer to rate their overall experience.

Conclusion

ECommerce customer service is one of the most important avenues for customer/store communication. It could mean the difference between a happy customer and an unsatisfied one.

There is a long list of tips you can use to provide the best customer service experience possible. Hopefully, one that will help you make a returning customer out of any shopper.