The holiday season is nearly upon us, and as the days pass by, so too do Amazon sellers’ opportunities to make ready for the avalanche of orders. There’s one area of the third-party seller business that needs to be tip-top, in particular – customer support.
To keep your inbox spick-and-span on the busiest days of the year, read our quick tips below
Dear Amazon Sellers, ‘Tis the Season to be Jolly
Customer service is an especially important aspect of selling on Amazon over the holidays. But if you were looking forward to the adrenaline rush, you’ve no doubt felt the pressure mounting when you received Amazon’s latest announcement.
We’re referring to the email at the end of which the world’s greatest online retailer asks third-party sellers to cut down their buyer-seller response time to half this month. That is to say Amazon wants sellers to respond to all their customer messages in 12 hours or less throughout December, rather than the standard 24-hour deadline they were used to.
Luckily, buyer-seller response times aren’t the kind of metrics that will lead to Amazon taking away your selling privileges. However, should your account be under review, these performance results and various others can stack up against you.
Amazon stands by this request, and reckons that its own efforts to send out responses within hours or even minutes will serve as an incentive to third-party sellers to up their game. But as the multinational counts on Amazon sellers to raise the stakes and offer the ultimate in customer service, there’s some danger of going overboard. After all, it’s not just timely responses that customers expect, but pertinent and effective ones, too.
How, then, will mom-and-pop shops who are no match for the likes of large-scale Amazon sellers, and who can’t afford to hire seasonal staff, cope with the change? Come to think of it, how will large-scale sellers manage to keep all their customers happy and ship out all those orders before the dreaded and unavoidable postal delays start creeping into the equation?
We have a few simple solutions in mind:
- Change item notes, clearly stating what the deadline is for Christmas deliveries. This should minimize incoming messages that have anything to do with arrival estimates.
- Send out more tracked shipments than usual. This should also reduce the workload on the customer service side of the operation, as well as the shipping department, in the long run.
- Pay extra attention to the tone you use and the solution you offer in your reply. Try to work out the issue for your customer from the get-go, rather than having a back-and-forth that wastes time for the both of you.
- Prioritize emails, especially those involving replacements. Spare no effort to come up with free replacements or substitutes, and cover delivery costs. Make sure there’s some leeway in terms of packaging and shipping, so that last-minute replacements can ship out first thing.
- When apologies are in order, don’t hold back on generous discounts, and issue your refunds promptly. Budget for them in advance, if possible.
- Also, when it comes to covering the cost of returned items, try to be a bit more lenient.
- Offer freebies or ‘Thank You’ notes whenever possible to rack up positive feedback in Q1.
- Don’t be afraid to use the ‘Mark as no response needed’ button whenever appropriate, even if on any other day you’d write back to say ‘Thanks’.
Well, so much for our tips, folks. If prompt replies are standard procedure for you, then your response time should be under 12 hours anyway, except maybe for weekends. That being said, every Amazon seller’s Q1 forecasts are bound to be a little gloomy, so even though there’s no telling what Q1 will mean for you, it can’t be too bad if you put some extra effort and time into it now.
Irina H. is our International Business Development Specialist and our company do-all, whose motto is ‘Never give up, never give in, and always give it your best’.