Good webshop customer service during corona

The COVID-19 virus has everyone in its grip. The closed shops and the amount of free time mean many Dutch consumers are turning to webshops. How do you make sure your webshop is ready for your customers and staff during the corona crisis?

We can no longer avoid it: the coronavirus. While most Dutch people are dutifully at home during the ‘lockdown light’, they go looking for new activities. Tidying your house a la Marie Condo, discovering the Picasso in you, finally fixing that one step on your stairs. Because most shops are closed, and consumers want to stick to staying at home, there is a lot of shopping going on at the webshops. Webshops and delivery services are working overtime. Good news for e-commerce, which according to Logistiek.nl is expected to grow by 50%. This upward line is very nice for the webshop, but it also brings the necessary challenges with it.

Is your webshop ready or at a standstill during the corona crisis?

Today's consumers have become ‘spoilt’ over the past few years. The on-demand services and fast delivery times of products have sharpened our expectations considerably. Precisely in times of unrest we cling to the things we know are guaranteed, including next day delivery. Whether the delivery is made the next day or not, there has to be clarity about it. Every company carries a responsibility in creating calm in this unrest. A smooth-running customer service is part of this.

Webshops bol.com and Coolblue notice the consequences of the corona crisis

Keep customer service running smoothly, with home workers too

A rising number of orders in combination with turbulent times brings a lot of customer questions with it. These are harder to answer if your whole customer service team is at home. Is your customer service not yet digitalised? Then this is the ideal chance to take this up. Offer your staff the right tools and you are already creating an optimisation of the service. Act in this time as a safety net for your staff and stand ready with strong yarn to make the net. A platform in which you centralise your online customer contact and in which you can work together, at a distance too, fits perfectly here.

Connect your favourite channels to Watermelon's dashboard and let all messages from different online sources come together. Centralise the conversations from your website chat, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Twitter, Telegram and Gmail in a single overview. Easily pick up incoming conversations and forward them to colleagues when needed. With the integrated CRM you build a 360° customer profile with the whole team.

Relief for the department through automation

An abundance of anxious customer questions and reduced capacity in the department effectively calls for only one thing: digitalisation. By automating the most frequently asked customer questions you make enormous strides in a very short time. Think for example of the following questions:

‘Can I still collect my parcel from the post office?
‘Is anything changing about the delivery service?
‘How does delivery work now?’
‘Why do you not sell face masks?’

A Conversational Assistant offers the perfect solution here. During the outbreak of COVID-19 the measures change regularly. Your Conversational Assistant is easy to adapt and is immediately visible so that your customers always have the latest information. Precisely now, with many home workers, this is a challenge. Prevent staff from overlooking measures/policies or translating them wrongly to customers.

Besides customers getting an answer to their questions 24/7, you relieve the pressure on the team. With a Conversational Assistant you quickly automate your first-line customer questions; this can rise to as much as 85% of your entire customer service. Stop missing out on sales because of long waiting times and offer the service your customers are asking for right now.

15% of shoppers leave the shopping basket behind full because they have not had an answer to the questions they had about the product. 25% do this because the delivery time is longer than expected (SAP, 2013). With an immediate answer to the questions they have and good expectation management you can already win back a lot of losses.

Start your automation, without programming

Conversational Assistants are no longer reserved only for webshops with an enormous budget and an IT department. Various platforms offer the possibility of bringing a digital colleague to life yourself. Besides being able to centralise all your customer contact with Watermelon, you can also build a Conversational Assistant without having to program for it. You no longer have to reinvent the wheel; we have done that for you, you only provide the cart that makes the whole thing run. Add frequently asked questions or create conversation flows with multiple-choice buttons and return questions.

Do you have no time during the crisis to build? We of course understand that completely! We have already done that for you too. Take a look at Assistant Tessa below, our e-commerce corona crisis expert. Request the Plug&Play Assistant and we will adapt it entirely to your objectives.

Nobody had seen this enormous growth in webshops coming, just as nobody saw COVID-19 coming. The art is to respond well to your customers' demand precisely now. Be there for your customers and staff during this turbulent period and offer them a stable factor. Would you like to know more about how to deploy chatbots successfully? Download the free whitepaper by clicking the button below!