Should E-Commerce Companies Improve Their Live Customer Support Options?

Shopping online can be a wonderful experience. It’s simply amazing that we can log on to our computers, or even smaller computers in our pockets, and browse through as many products as our hearts desire. We can peruse millions of items and purchase pretty much anything we wish without ever leaving our house or even our bed for that matter. What a remarkable convenience!

But have you ever completed an order for something on a website or mobile app, and then for whatever reason, you needed support from a real, live person, particularly via the phone? Uh oh, good luck! Turns out, this can be a huge inconvenience.

Upon searching for live customer support contact options on many e-commerce websites, you’ll notice they can sometimes be near impossible to find. That’s because many actually are. Attempting to find phone support for an e-commerce interaction can be exponentially more difficult. If a phone opportunity even exists, the number is often buried deep in text or hard-to-read print or font, takes several page clicks to find, hidden at the end of a perplexing self-service tool, or marked as being an information line as opposed to a true support channel. In other words, it’s definitely not easily accessible or customer friendly.

Why is this the case?

In fairness, many e-commerce merchants are small operations; an example might include a successful T-shirt business run by two people. They simply don’t have the time or person-power to answer incoming calls, hence no number provided. Similarly, they also don’t have the resources or personnel available to maintain a live contact support option of any kind whatsoever. The company is literally just two friends whose successful hobby has turned into a miniature thriving business. They are completely overwhelmed, making any sort of customer engagement quite difficult to achieve.

Another reason could be that an e-commerce seller has grown quickly (as is often the case with internet success stories), and while they might have a steadily expanding team of employees, they may have simply dropped the ball and forgotten, or not initially even thought about, the option of adding live support to their customer service operations. In a world where creative, product-minded people are now often just as likely to attain corporate success as those with a more traditional business background, they may additionally lack the skill sets to add a robust support option (let alone a more complex call center option). Alternatively, investing in a full-scale support operation may be on the backburner as they prioritize other goals. There may be a substantial disconnect between the size of the business and the scope of the live support offering they actually need. Customers, for the time being, are out of luck. 

Finally, a company just flat out might not be interested in having an online live support or a phone alternative available for their customers. They are doing well enough and have determined that it’s just not worth the extra effort, expense, or person-power to have these communication routes. They intentionally do not list a way to call a representative, or they purposely bury the number somewhere deep on the website in order to negate calls. They also feel that it’s just not worth it to invest in other live contact options at all.

The specific aversion to offering support may not, however, even be about cost-cutting or limiting inbound calls. E-commerce entrepreneurs with a digital-first mindset are keenly aware their customers feel comfortable placing orders online, and they know that the majority (if not all) of their friends and colleagues prefer texting to calling in their everyday lives. They simply do not see the value a phone option brings to the table.

Should e-commerce companies offer easily accessible phone support, or at the very least, a more well-rounded set of digital contact options to handle customer inquiries that come in?

We can help answer this question by addressing a different one. That is - Do customers still want phone support? “The phone is the most used (48%) and the preferred method (80%) to interact with support agents.” (talkdesk.com)

In another survey by UseResponse, 39%, an overwhelming majority of customers, prefer the phone to fulfill their customer service needs. (useresponse.com)

And one more just for good measure. “For more complicated interactions, such as payment disputes, 40% of customers prefer talking to a real person over the phone.” (AE from nextiva.com)

Overwhelmingly, it’s quite clear the phone option is still a popular choice among customers everywhere. People like the option to initiate contact through this route.

In fairness, however, these statistics do not necessarily confirm that a massive segment of the population actually loves talking on the phone. They simply confirm that many customers gravitate towards the phone as a top-of-mind support option.

Rather than personal taste, a reason many customers choose the phone route is because they understand how it works and thus see it as their most reliable option. The process makes sense to them; they find the number, call, and reach a live person with whom they can converse about their issue at hand. If they’re looking to voice a complaint, they can do so to a real person who is actually listening. If they’re looking for a unique resolution to a problem (as opposed to “policy”), they can attempt to obtain help and creative decision-making from a human with the ability to empathize.

To put it simply, even people who may not be huge fans of talking to someone on the phone in their personal lives often still call because it’s the option they know will get the job done and that is most likely to help them resolve their issue(s) in the shortest amount of time. They do it because it works. 

On the other side of the coin, some customers are less “pulled” by the appeal of the phone than they are “pushed” by their lack of positive experiences in digital. There are people who don’t like chatbots, for example, because it seems every website has a different way to approach them, with unique prompts and varying amounts of time or questions that must be answered before either receiving help or getting escalated to a real person.

That real person may not even be of much help at all; many chat, social, and messaging representatives follow the script verbatim, eliminating any semblance of an authentic conversation or chance of a creative resolution. Email may support more thorough details of an issue, but as it is rarely portrayed as a real-time conversation channel, response rates tend to be quite unsatisfactory. They certainly do not support those looking for speedy assistance.

So how can companies put all this together to deliver a better customer experience in the face of budget and staff challenges?

One answer is to do a sort of marrying of the two options discussed thus far. One can imagine that if companies are able to truly provide a more seamless online experience from beginning to end, creating a solid customer journey, that perhaps there is less overall need for phone support. Furthermore, if online live support options are improved, then customers will likely feel more satisfied with the service. If orders are almost always correct, if questions can easily be answered via self-service options, or if a live person on the other side of a chat or messaging platform can quickly provide customers with exactly the information or support for which they are seeking, then perhaps a majority of the customers will walk away happy. 

For companies with fewer resources, a digital live support option is also preferable because it can achieve more with less personnel. For instance, one live agent on the other side of a chat window can attend to multiple incoming inquiries at once, whereas a phone agent can only handle one call at a time. 

For a look at a recent hiccup, currently playing out as we speak, take a look at Lessons from the Launch of Online Sports Betting in NY by Philip Mandelbaum at CEI to see just how big the debacle can be for a company that doesn’t properly address some of the questions we’ve covered in this article. It’s safe to say the customer experience may have gone a bit smoother here if contact support options were properly in place and well thought out in advance. Perhaps if a more well-rounded live customer support option were available, much of what happened here could have been avoided, or at the very least, tempered down a bit.

A final thought.

Many people still opt for the phone support option, either because they actually prefer it, or simply because they know it’s the most likely route for them to achieve what they need. E-commerce companies must use this knowledge to their advantage and adapt. They can add phone support, with easily identifiable contact numbers on their websites and apps so that customers can call whenever they desire to speak with someone, or they can make their online live agent experience so powerful, accurate and time sensitive that the overwhelming amount of customers’ demands are met in this manner. Perhaps the later option will best serve businesses who have fewer resources.

Personally, I’m a strong proponent of the phone support contact method. I believe companies win over customers for decades by providing users with this option. I’m a subscriber to a few different online services, ones which I know are a bit outdated and which are no longer considered the “best” on the market, but the customer service via phone has always been awesome. It’s familiar to me, it works, and I like it! For this reason, I am a loyal customer and will continue to be so well into the future. Providing customers with a digital live support option is the next best thing.