Self-Service in E-commerce: A Powerful Asset for Boosting Customer Relationships

94% of French people want to solve their own problems (source: Yext study, 2023). Today's e-buyers want to find accessible answers in just a few clicks, whatever the time of day or day. Traditional customer services are hardly capable of such responsiveness, but fortunately there is a solution: self-service. Find out in this article about the benefits of self-service tools, and how to set them up easily.

 

What is self-service?

Self-service refers to all the tools that enable your customers to find precise and immediate answers to their questions themselves . Self-care complements your customer service, giving it greater responsiveness and autonomy.

What are the advantages of self-service?

For your customers, an immediate response at any time

It's Saturday night, 10pm. One of your customers is trying to place an order on your e-commerce site. Unfortunately, his credit card is not recognized. Confused, he tries to find a solution, but it's impossible for him to reach your customer service department at this hour. The customer leaves his browser and abandons his shopping cart in frustration.

This situation could have been avoided with a self-service solution. By enabling your customers to find the answer to their questions at any time, you limit their frustration. In fact, 39% of customers consider it a priority to get an answer the first time they call (source: Qualimétrie, 2022).

Even if this response has to be supplemented by customer service support, the user at least has a way forward.

For your teams, time saved for other tasks

Self-service also relieves your teams of generic, repetitive questions. "How do I return an order?", "My card is not recognized" - these problems often lead to the same answer, wasting precious time.

The time your customer service department saves on these questions can be reinvested in dealing with more specific problems.

And as a salesperson, you know it: every time you save on ancillary tasks, you can focus on your core business: selling.

 

How do you implement a self-service solution?

There areseveral options for implementing a self-service solution:

Set up a FAQ

A Frequently Asked Question, or FAQ, is a section of your e-commerce site (or your e-shop on the marketplace of your choice) dedicated to recurring questions.

Here are a few points to bear in mind when setting up an effective FAQ:

• Easy access : include links to this FAQ on every page of your site.
• Short, pertinent answers: give the key to the problem in a few words. If your customers want to dig deeper into certain questions, you can always include a link to a more detailed page.
• Exhaustiveness: make sure you cover all your customers' recurring questions.

Create a customer forum

This more interactive solution enables your customers to ask their questions directly on your site. Other users can then respond and share their own experiences. When your customer service department is available, it can then take over and provide more precise answers.

The customer forum solution has the advantage of interactivity. However, it requires customers who are ready to interact on the forum. What's more, it requires technical resources for implementation and a team dedicated to forum moderation (to sort through posts, respond to comments, etc.). So it's not the best solution if you're working with a small team.

Implementing a chatbot

A chatbot is a virtual assistant that helps your customers find their answers. There are three types of chatbot:

• Simple chatbots: they operate according to predefined scripts, often based on keywords or suggested queries. These are the simplest and least expensive to set up, but lack flexibility.
• Intelligent chatbots: these are based on machine learning and natural language processing. They are capable of analyzing the intention behind messages and providing a highly personalized response to the interlocutor.
• Hybrid chatbots: these combine the functionalities of simple and hybrid chatbots. They first use AI to identify the query, before redirecting the interlocutor to a script or human customer service.

At Rakuten, our Yuki customer chatbot combines these three approaches and is evolving every day. Today, it relies on Large Language Models (LLM) to offer increasingly personalized responses to customers. The ultimate goal? To turn it into a complete virtual assistant, capable of complementing our human approach to provide the best answers, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day.

 

Self-service, a complementary approach to human relations

Self-care tools are an invaluable asset in your e-commerce strategy, but they must not replace human customer service. At Rakuten, we're convinced that the human relationship must remain at the heart of interactions between customer and salesperson.

That's why our marketplace offers complete, dedicated customer service support for our sellers. We provide them with specific tools for their online store. And as a seller on Rakuten, you benefit from significant support via our internal messaging system, to help you manage and optimize your after-sales service.

Your customers need to feel listened to, unique. They need to understand that their satisfaction is your team's priority. So always keep in mind the balance between human support and self-care.

For example, you can integrate into your FAQ or chatbot the possibility of making an appointment with a member of your customer service team.