Good customer service is the live wire of every business. It ensures the continuity of business, and can single-handedly determine how much successful a business will be. Just like an off-line business, operating an ecommerce business requires outstanding customer support because customers always want to get value for their money.

In ecommerce, good customer service is not negotiable for obvious reasons. Most customers are very sceptical in buying from online retail shops because there’s no physical location where they can track down the company and get the service they demand. However, through a vibrant customer support, you can gain the confidence of your customers by building positive relationships with them.

With more ecommerce stores springing up every day to compete with established ones like swap.com, the industry is expected to grow to as much as $2.5trillion by the end of 2018. Aside having a well-designed, user friendly ecommerce store, you also need high risk merchant services if you're a high risk Internet merchant. Again, you need to offer qualitative customer support to be seen as actual business partners, rather than abstract organizations.

Here are valuable tips to help ecommerce companies create positive customer experiences.

1. Provide helpful information

Customers love it when they get all the information they need to solve their problems upon visiting your website. Usually they try to solve their problems on their own before deciding to engage a customer agent. This is why you must have an updated FAQ database that should be easily accessible on your web pages.

2. Make your live chat effective

When customers run into technical problems they can’t solve on their own, they interact with a customer support agent via the live chat. This provides an interactive, step-by-step approach to problem solving and also ensures immediate response. However, a slow, irresponsive live chat can be very annoying, and it may eventually drive customers away.

3. Use the right tools

There are many technologies which can help you provide an outstanding customer service. For example, giant ecommerce companies like eBay have mobile and web tools which allow customers to search for products, bid on unique items, track packages, leave feedback and respond to important messages. There are eBay coupons plugins which help buyers get the best deals, and they love it. So look for a way to simplify processes for your customers by investing in the right tools.

4. Focus on timely response

Most customers evaluate business performance through response patterns. It is obvious that customers will likely stay with companies which provide swift responses to their queries. According to a study, 84% of customers reported being either likely or very likely to do business with a company if it responded via phone in less than a minute. But only 53% of customers reported they would likely do business with a company if they had to wait for longer than a minute.

5. Offer multiple support channels

Today most customers prefer to use more than one channel to relate with the customer support of companies they’re patronizing. A larger percentage of customers rely more on modern technologies such as mobile applications and social media networks in place of traditional channels like phone call and email, for interacting with companies. Put in place a creative web design, and robust social media presence.

In fact customers are less likely to buy from companies who leave complaints on their social media pages unattended to. For such customers, this is their quickest way of knowing a company that really cares about their concerns.