Seasonal and holiday Company Stores are in full swing! Tis the season for quick store launches, tight deadlines, and last-minute orders. Which also means, an increase in calls from shoppers needing help. We’ve compiled our top three tips for using your Company Stores as a tool for customer service. These suggestions apply year-round for your Company Stores. But during the holiday season, it is especially important to help shoppers easily place their orders to avoid delay.
1) Create a Contact Us Page
It’s surprising how often this page is overlooked when building a Company Store, but a Contact Us page is arguably the most important page in any store. It has to be easy for the shopper to know who to reach out to if they need help placing an order. As a distributor, the best contact person is you or someone at your company who knows exactly how the program is set-up, how shoppers will place and pay for their orders, and how to find the order status of each product. Our support team at BrightStores is here to support you; we don’t actually take end-user calls (we’ll refer them back to you). To decrease that friction, build a Contact Us page that will stand out with your contact information clearly stated. You can do this yourself by using the drag and drop page builders or have our Store Art team create a custom designed page or a large Contact Us button.
2) Allow Shoppers to Create an Account
When shoppers create an account in the store, they have access to their Account Dashboard, a convenient Company Store feature for checking up on the status of their orders. For shoppers to have the most current information, you’ll have to stay on top of updating the order statuses and shipping information. Once shoppers have an account, they’ll have access to the following information:
Order History – Shoppers can find the details of all their current and past orders in this location. A new Re-Order button on the shopper’s order history page will allow them to add all items from a previous order into their shopping cart.
Address Book – With the address book, shoppers can store frequently used addresses that will auto-populate when they are going through checkout, so they don’t have to fill in that information every time.
Account Balance – Shoppers can enter a gift certificate code to load their account balances. Perfect for managing large company programs where each shopper is given a certain amount to spend in the store.
Logos – Shoppers can see their company’s logos and can even upload a logo. If the store has logo permissions enabled, the shopper will only see the logo(s) they are to use.
Budget Information – Does the shopper have a cap or limit they are allowed to spend in the store? If they are included in a budget group, they can see what that budget is and how much they are allowed to spend.
3) Create an FAQ Page
Lastly, to make sure you have all of your Customer Service bases covered, create an FAQ page to publicly answer common questions shoppers will have and hopefully reduce the amount of support calls you’ll receive. You can include answers for shipping questions, size charts, and walking the shopper through how to set up an account in the store. You can also use this page to explain the details of the store, why it has been set up, and how the program works. For example, if it’s a Reward and Recognition program, you can use this page to say something along the lines of, “you’ve been such an amazing employee, you can pick out a gift from us! Keep up the great work, and you’ll have access to an even better gift in the future.”
