/ How to use your customer service for good aftersales.
Alexander Wijninga
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5 min
Have you ever thought about your aftersales strategy? You achieve a great deal with it, without having to invest much money in it. 80% of all SMEs have no good, worked-out or effective aftersales strategy. That is a shame of course, because a good aftersales strategy considerably increases the chance that a customer returns or tells other people about your product. Would you like to know what aftersales involves exactly, why it is important and how best to approach it? Then read this article.
Aftersales is all the contact you as a company have with the customer after the purchase of your service or product. It involves providing more information; news via an email funnel, for example, extra help with the service or the product, or advice about buying other products. A customer satisfaction survey is also part of this process. That way you notice whether customers are satisfied and whether they will therefore return later. A good aftersales strategy is a fixed part of your customer journey.
Only by applying aftersales do you find out how a customer experiences your product. Research shows that 60% of consumers do not get in touch with a company when they are not entirely satisfied with a product afterwards. So you never get feedback about possible points for improvement. 80% of consumers say that when they are dissatisfied, without telling a company about their displeasure, they switch to a competitor's product. By staying in contact with a customer after a purchase you quickly notice when someone is not satisfied, and you get the chance to work in a more customer-centric way and resolve it. That way more customers stay in your sales funnel and you retain more satisfied customers.
There are several aspects that together make a good aftersales strategy. Whatever you choose, or whatever your aftersales strategy looks like, one thing should be central: customer-friendliness. Make sure your staff think along with a customer and stay friendly at all times. Apply this by carrying through the following points:
To find out what a customer really thinks of your product, always ask for feedback afterwards. Send an automatic email a week after the purchase, for example, and ask how the customer experienced your customer service. Is this email not answered enough? Then attach a reward to it: give the customer a discount code, for instance! This also stimulates the sale of your products again.
When you are reachable 24/7, you make the step of getting in touch with you a good deal smaller for the customer. Implement a chatbot to catch all the first-line customer contact and let the chatbot hand the conversation over to a human member of staff when it cannot handle the questions properly.
Thanks to social media anyone can leave reviews anywhere. Make sure you always respond to positive messages; that way people are encouraged to post this kind of message. On top of that it is of course important to respond to the negative reactions too: that way you can still help the customer, or you can let them see the other side of the story.
When someone has made a purchase and you are one new email address richer, you can add them to a mailing list. That way you can promote new products or services by email, and increase your sales opportunities. You also send your new customers a monthly newsletter, so that they stay informed about the latest developments within your company.
At Zappos customer-friendliness ranks high. So high that it is their number one priority. This shines through in their aftersales too. When you have contacted customer service, you then get an email from your new ‘friend’ at Zappos. From that moment on you are also congratulated on your birthday, and you are signed up straight away for their newsletter, in which everything about the company's progress is told with fitting enthusiasm. You are also informed by email about their 365-day return policy, so that you are more inclined to get in touch again or buy a product.
A good aftersales strategy can be very time-consuming. To make sure you build a good, watertight strategy without losing too much time, you implement a chatbot. There are various ways in which a chatbot helps you towards a good aftersales strategy. That way you save time, collect customer data automatically and ask for feedback easily.
With an e-commerce chatbot you automate up to 85% of your digital customer contact, which means you lose less time to your customer service. The time you normally spend answering frequently asked questions you now easily put into your aftersales.
A chatbot stores all the relevant information about a customer. When you connect your CRM system to a chatbot's brain, it easily fills it in for you. The chatbot asks your customers for their email address and name, which lets you make a good mailing list for your aftersales.
When a customer has bought a product, you can choose to have a message pop up from a chatbot, to ask the customer about their experience. This can be done by asking a question, or by simply showing happy and angry emoticons the customer can click on. Does the customer click on the happy emoticon? Great! Does the customer click on the angry emoticon after all? Then you can ask the customer why they are dissatisfied. That way you can optimise your service in a targeted way, without taking up too much of the customer's time.
With Watermelon you build a chatbot quickly and without programming thanks to easy chatbot software, which assists you in the aftersales process. You choose yourself when a chatbot passes a conversation on to a real member of staff. That way you have the perfect combination of human and technology. Curious? Try it yourself and create a free account.
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