The biggest pain point of cross-border e-commerce now is poor customer experience. The deep-seated reasons include: cross-border logistics, high communication costs, etc., and disputes in cross-border e-commerce often put great pressure and losses on sellers, which is difficult to be as simple as Taobao returns, so the ability to resolve online customer order disputes is particularly important. The general process of resolving customer disputes is as follows.
1. Let customers feel the seller’s sincerity in resolving disputes
In fact, Western consumers attach great importance to the seller’s attitude, because Western consumer concepts are very mature, and buyers think that it is natural for sellers to be grateful for buyers’ purchases. This is why Western consumers emphasize shopping rights and interests. When encountering disputes such as customer dissatisfaction with products, poor logistics experience, and customer requests for refunds, the first thing to do is to reflect our attitude towards resolving disputes, be grateful to customers, express understanding of their experiences, and promise to actively solve problems.
2. Truly understand the ins and outs of order disputes
The most controversial aspects of cross-border e-commerce are likely to be concentrated in the logistics link, such as lost items and damaged products. When encountering a customer order dispute, you should first calmly analyze the ins and outs of the matter, and pay attention to the electronic format and evidence, such as chat records and logistics records. If you need to ask the logistics company to solve the problem, you can use real electronic evidence to communicate with the customer sincerely and pray for the customer’s understanding. Paying attention to electronic data evidence should be the core tool for resolving order disputes.
3. The ability to guide customers’ negative emotions
If there is a dispute over the order and they are not satisfied with the product, customers will definitely have a lot of negative emotions, which may be expressed in the form of bad reviews and exposure on social media. This is the time to test the business capabilities of online customer service. At this time, the English level of customer service staff will be fully utilized here. Good customer service will fully communicate with customers through their professionalism and language skills, through internal messages, APP software or telephone, and understand and identify with customers, so that customers can trust the company again, resolve customers’ negative emotions, and lay the foundation for the resolution of disputes. Cross-border e-commerce dispute resolution is definitely not as simple as Taobao’s return of goods and money, so there are actually great skills in handling it.
4. Resolve disputes sincerely and appropriately
For example, if a dispute arises when sending a cross-border express to the United States, the logistics cost is often much higher than the price of the product itself. Many newcomers to cross-border e-commerce consider the satisfaction of store operations, the store’s praise rate and ratings, and in order to quickly resolve customer disputes, they directly and hastily inform customers that the goods are no longer needed and all the money will be returned to the buyer.
In fact, this seemingly generous dispute handling method proves the unprofessionalism and immaturity of online customer service, because this is the biggest cost loss for sellers, and they have the least customer service skills. Many times, many European and American customers will feel that you are not sincere, because more customers spend money in the hope of getting the products they really want. Simply giving away goods for free and returning the money in full cannot restore the customer’s experience.
5. Second free delivery
The second way to resolve disputes is to send the goods to the customer again for free. There is actually a communication skill here. On the basis of full forgiveness from the customer, we can suggest that the customer bear part of the value of the goods. For example, if a product costs $100, but the customer is not satisfied with it due to damage or other reasons, we ask the customer to bear $70. In fact, most customers are willing to accept this. At the same time, the second shipment, plus the profit margin of the product, can sometimes break even – no profit or loss.
6. Give customers a discount
This is the method we most advocate. For example, if the product is damaged, we can directly deduct the transaction amount from the customer. Generally speaking, customers are willing to accept this, but there will be a communication skill problem here. The ability of online customer service communication skills directly determines the extent of customer concessions.