Cross-border e-commerce customer service is a type of e-commerce customer service, which is a customer service work based on the Internet. Cross-border e-commerce customer service personnel undertake the functions of answering customer inquiries (price, logistics), accepting order business, promoting products, handling disputes and complaints, and directly contacting customers from different countries and regions through various communication tools. Cross-border e-commerce customer service personnel are the information transmitters of the enterprise, playing a connecting role. They are responsible for conveying customer suggestions on products, opinions on website platform operation and other feedback to other relevant departments within the company.
The scope of work of cross-border e-commerce customer service can be summarized into 4 parts, mainly answering customer inquiries, solving after-sales problems, promoting sales and management monitoring. Let’s take a look at answering customer inquiries.
In order to do a good job of answering, cross-border e-commerce customer service personnel must first understand the types of customer consultation questions. Especially for cross-border e-commerce on B2C platforms, represented by AliExpress, the characteristics of its platform operation are fragmented, miniaturized, and multi-frequency orders. Customers will ask a lot of questions about the seller’s products or services. Therefore, customer service personnel mainly provide high-quality Q&A services for “products” and “services”.
First, answer inquiries about goods. At present, the enterprises engaged in cross-border e-commerce in China mainly include trading companies, integrated production and sales enterprises, e-commerce platform operation service companies, etc., especially trading companies and e-commerce platform operation service companies, which generally operate a variety of goods at the same time, ranging from 3C products, namely computers, communications and consumer electronics, to toys, clothing, luggage, jewelry, etc. These commodity categories involve many industries, and the required commodity expertise spans a wide range and is highly professional, which makes customer service work more complicated. In addition, commodity specifications will vary according to market demand in different countries and regions. For example, there are several common international standards for shoe sizes, such as European size (EUR), American size (US), British size (UK), and Japanese size (JP). my country uses millimeters or centimeters to measure shoe sizes, such as 230 mm or 23 cm. Therefore, if a British customer says “I’d like to buy the sandals at size 5.5”, the customer service staff of cross-border e-commerce should know what size shoes this refers to, and what size the shoes the customer wants are converted to according to the domestic size. Another example is the voltage of electrical appliances. The voltage in China is 220V, the voltage in Japan is 110V, and the voltage in the UK is 200V. In addition, the standards of electrical plugs in different countries are not the same. The most common ones are British standard plugs and American standard plugs. These problems caused by different commodity specifications and standards in different countries make customer service staff face many difficulties when answering questions about commodities.
Secondly, answer service questions. Since the transaction process and service content of cross-border e-commerce are more complicated than those of domestic e-commerce, cross-border e-commerce customer service staff need to answer customers’ questions about the transportation logistics method, transportation time, customs clearance, return and exchange, and safety of commodities. In order to reduce the poor physical experience of customers due to online shopping, reduce the complexity of cross-border transactions, improve customer shopping experience, and increase service satisfaction, customer service staff need to proactively contact customers, such as sending emails to ask for customers’ WhatsApp contact information, confirm shipping addresses, and urge payment, etc., in order to satisfy customers.