Fast customer service is often the difference between maintaining loyal customers and gaining a competitive advantage in the retail space. Businesses that prioritize resolving customer questions and complaints quickly can stand out in a market where consumer experiences are deteriorating.
Forrester's 2024 U.S. Customer Experience Index revealed that US consumers are experiencing the worst customer experiences in a decade. The average effectiveness of experiences fell to 64%, and the average ease of experiences dropped to 66%. This creates an opportunity for retail brands to differentiate themselves through exceptional service.
Ahead, you'll learn why your retail brand should prioritize fast customer service as a competitive advantage, and some actionable tips for improving your business's support department.
Nine tips for offering faster customer service
Providing fast customer service is crucial to satisfying consumer needs and remaining competitive.
Here are nine tips for offering fast customer service at your retail business.
- Centralize customer data and personalize experiences
- Be authentic
- Provide mobile support
- Lean into AI chatbots
- Invest in training customer support agents
- Prioritize customer support requests
- Provide self-service options
- Speed up initial response time
- Always ask for feedback
1. Centralize customer data and personalize experiences
Having one complete record of customer information helps you solve problems faster. This is what Shopify's customer profiles do for you.
When someone buys something—or even starts to buy but doesn't finish—Shopify automatically creates a profile for them. This profile keeps all their important information in one place:
- Their name and contact details
- What they've ordered before
- Their subscription choices
- Any notes or tags your team adds
Keeping all this information together lets you see everything about your relationship with each customer at once. For example:
- Support staff can quickly look up what a customer ordered and where it was shipped.
- If a customer contacts you about a missing package, you can find all the details right away.
- You don't need to search through multiple different systems for information.
Coravin faced challenges with fragmented customer service systems before migrating to Shopify. Their team was using separate platforms for payment processing, fraud tracking, and ecommerce transactions, creating what CEO Dave Krupinski called "a very disjointed customer service experience."
After switching to Shopify, Coravin consolidated these tools into a single platform, which significantly enhanced their customer service team's efficiency. "One of the things that everyone at Coravin has been surprised by is just how much friction is removed from the process," says Dave. This unified approach improved customer satisfaction for both internal staff and external customers.
You can also edit these unified customer profiles. If someone has a new email or phone number, you can update it directly. You can combine duplicate profiles to make sure you have just one record per customer, and add tags or notes to help with future support.
In exchange for customers’ names, email addresses, and phone numbers, consider offering them perks to improve the shopping experience:
- Discount or promo codes
- Exclusive back-in-stock and new-in notifications
- Vouchers
- Early access to new product lines
Unify your customer data in a CRM so your customer service representatives can easily get context on each customer and their issues or questions.
2. Be authentic
When customers have problems, they want to be treated like real people, not just ticket numbers. This is true whether you handle 10 complaints a day or thousands.
Customers value honesty above all. In fact, Edelman’s 2023 Trust Barometer found that 94% of consumers are more loyal to brands that show complete transparency.
Every growing retail business faces issues like:
- Delivery delays
- Wrong items being sent
- Products arriving damaged
Many of these problems happen because of things you can't control, like shipping companies or warehouse issues.
Even though you can't avoid all these problems, your customer service team needs good ways to handle them. The best approach is to be completely honest—if restocking will take two more weeks, tell customers that directly.
3. Provide mobile support
Over 60% of US adults believe that mobile shopping is a necessity for convenience when shopping online, according to a recent Morning Consult poll. Retailers that want to tap into mobile commerce should make it straightforward for people to reach customer service team members.
Brands like Allbirds, for example, make it easy for customers to get support when shopping on their phones. You can choose between a chatbot, phone call, text message, email, or FAQ page.
If you want to chat, you can browse through pre-answered questions or message with an agent.
Fast customer service needs to happen where your customers are shopping. So if your customers are using their mobile devices to buy your products, make it easy for them to get support there.
4. Lean into AI chatbots
Data from Tidio shows that 87% of live chat conversations receive a positive customer satisfaction (CSAT) rating. People want efficient customer service instantly. AI chatbots let businesses provide instant replies without relying on a full-time human support team.
Use AI chatbots to provide instant responses to customer inquiries. Your chatbot can provide a list of suggested questions or a menu of options for customers to choose from.
Shopify Inbox uses AI to help you sell more, not just answer questions. The best part? Our data shows that 70% of customers in chats are people ready to buy, not just asking for help.
Shopify Inbox also helps your store:
- Create instant answers to common questions
- Suggest replies you can quickly edit and send
- Show what's in your customer's cart while you chat
- Flag conversations most likely to lead to sales
When customers visit your store, they want quick answers. Shopify Magic creates personalized FAQs that appear in your chat window. This helps shoppers find information without waiting for you to respond.
No time for live chat? No problem:
- Set up welcome messages that greet customers automatically.
- Let them know when you'll be available.
- Collect their email to continue the conversation later.
- Never miss a sales opportunity, even when you're busy.
"Shopify Inbox is a powerful tool... it helps me rescue sales after spending time, money, and energy getting a customer to that point. It pays huge dividends," says Rennie Wood, owner of Wood Wood Toys.
The AI also helps you close sales by showing what's in a customer's cart and letting you share special discount codes during your chat. Turn browsers into buyers without being online 24/7.
5. Invest in training customer support agents
While AI tools like Shopify Inbox can handle many customer interactions automatically, the most complex customer issues will still require human expertise.
For these situations, well-trained support agents remain essential to your customer service strategy. Investing in consistent training programs and resources will level up and improve the support they provide to customers.
Build regular training into your customer support team’s schedule by:
- Creating a central resource hub with example scenarios
- Scheduling monthly training sessions
- Offering roleplay and feedback sessions
- Sharing videos demonstrating customer issue resolution
- Providing question-and-answer sessions
Investing in customer service skills training will pay dividends. Your agents will feel empowered to solve customer issues effectively, while shoppers will be impressed by your brand’s efficiency and ability to solve problems.
6. Prioritize customer support requests
Not all customer issues need immediate attention—it's important to know which problems need solving right away and which ones can wait.
Create a sorting system for your customer service team to categorize incoming requests. For example:
- A broken product that's already been delivered is higher priority.
- A question about when an item will be back in stock is lower priority.
You can use Shopify Flow to automate this prioritization process. Its low-code editor lets you build custom workflows without coding skills—perfect for creating automated ticket-sorting systems. Set up conditional logic that automatically tags and routes different types of support requests based on keywords or order status.
For simple questions like product sizes, delivery times, and shipping costs, your AI chatbot can respond automatically. You can set up automatic responses for all lower-priority issues, like inviting customers to sign up for back-in-stock notifications.
Remember though: automation only works for basic questions. More complex or urgent problems will still need your human support team's personal attention and expertise.
7. Provide self-service options
Offering self-service support options helps your business stand out. Today's busy customers, whether B2B or B2C, appreciate quick solutions and being able to help themselves. Many businesses don't need a full call center, since a well-designed self-service center can often handle many support needs effectively.
B2B customers particularly value self-service options that respect their time and technical knowledge. For example, Filtrous, a laboratory supply company, experienced major improvements after focusing on self-service capabilities.
Creating an intuitive online ordering system boosted Filtrous’ organic conversion rate by 27%, and saved their customer service team 10 hours of manual work per week. Their B2B customers can now place orders and manage their accounts themselves without needing to contact support.
As a best practice, always let new customers know you offer self-service customer assistance. You can use a partner app like HelpLab to easily create self-service help centers for your store.
8. Speed up initial response time
Fast response times are crucial when customers reach out for help. Whether they contact you by phone, email, or chat, how quickly you respond shapes their impression of your service. Delayed email replies or ignored social media messages can quickly drive customers away.
However, providing faster responses puts extra pressure on support teams. Businesses often need to add more staff during busy periods or extend service hours, which increases costs.
To offer quick responses without having a 24/7 support team, consider these approaches:
- Set up automated initial responses for live chat and email to acknowledge customer issues immediately.
- Use chatbots to handle simple questions and guide customers to self-service options.
- For phone support, track key metrics like first-response time and resolution time to identify bottlenecks.
- Prioritize high-urgency issues while setting clear expectations for response times on less critical matters.
These strategies help balance customer expectations for quick service with the practical limitations of your support team's availability and resources.
9. Always ask for feedback
After any interaction with your support team, it’s best to follow up with customers and ask for feedback. Moving forward, your team needs to be able to identify where things went well and what requires improvement.
Customer feedback surveys are an excellent way of helping your customers feel heard and valued.
To get a better understanding of how customers feel about your service, you can ask questions like:
- Were you satisfied with the response time today?
- Did our customer service rep answer all your questions?
- Did you receive the solution you were looking for?
- Can you rate your overall experience on a scale of 1 to 10?
Survey insights can help you better understand customers and find opportunities for improving service delivery. To thank customers for sharing their time and thoughts with your business, you could offer respondents an incentive like a discount code.
Shopify merchants can use apps like POWR to ask customers for feedback following purchases or interactions with their support teams. The app makes it easy to customize simple customer feedback surveys:
Why you should provide fast customer service
Customers expect fast, effective customer service from retail brands. Providing fast customer service can be a key competitive differentiator––customers hate waiting and wasting their precious time. Businesses that get it right can expect happy, loyal, and satisfied customers.
Companies that don’t keep up with customer expectations may pay a high price. If the quality of service is low or too slow, customer loyalty may slip and consumers may churn to another business.
Here are the top three benefits of providing fast customer service.
Improves customer satisfaction
Fast customer service is one of the top ways to boost customer satisfaction. By gathering customer feedback and solving their problems quickly, you give them a memorable customer experience.
Ensuring customers are satisfied with your business’s overall offering is key for your long-term success in a competitive marketplace. Ultimately, if consumers are satisfied with your offering and your customer service, they’ll continue to choose your business.
Elevates your competitive advantage
Customers rely on fast customer service, and if it’s not available they’re prepared to leave and look elsewhere.
Customers return to the businesses that give them the best experiences. Offering top-quality fast customer service helps your business stand out. For example, if two brands offer a similar product at the same price point, their only competitive advantage would be to offer exceptional customer service. This includes speedy support.
Build customer trust
Fast customer service proves your business is reliable and that customers can trust it to deliver on its promises. Consumers may need assistance with everything from website glitches to faulty products and delayed delivery dates.
When things go wrong, customers want to know your business will be able to resolve issues quickly and efficiently.
Make great customer service a priority today
Providing high-quality and fast customer service is often what lays the foundation for a loyal fan base of shoppers. Solving customer problems always needs to be a priority––people need to feel they can trust your business even after a negative experience.
To stand out in an increasingly competitive retail landscape, brands need to tap into customer preferences. Find the communication channels your customers prefer using and invest time and resources in providing the best experience possible.
Fast customer service FAQ
What are the benefits of having faster customer service?
Fast customer service is essential for keeping customers satisfied. The aim of fast customer service is to quickly and effectively provide customers with solutions and answers to their questions. When you value customer time, they’ll be more likely to remain loyal to your business and keep coming back.
What is the difference between good customer service and excellent customer service?
Good customer service is responding to customer inquiries in a timely and friendly manner, whereas excellent customer service goes beyond that by going out of the way to make sure the customer is satisfied. Excellent customer service means providing personalized solutions and taking extra steps to ensure the customer's needs are met.
What is the best customer service?
Delivering the best customer service means engaging with customer needs, having an authentic approach, and delivering helpful resources. Excellent customer service means going above and beyond your customers’ needs and exceeding expectations. Essentially, top customer service means doing everything to ensure customers aren’t just satisfied but are delighted by your product and services.
How can you provide fast customer service?
You can provide time-sensitive customer service by shortening response times and providing solutions to customers more quickly. Use AI-powered chatbots to answer customer queries in real time and set auto-responses to email inquiries. Customers also expect brands to provide an omnichannel support experience, so they can make contact on their preferred channels.
