Five Benefits of Customer Service Outsourcing for Shopify Plus Stores

Shopify Plus is dominating the ecommerce industry as more brands flock to it. In 2024, there are already 4.4 million Shopify stores.

What does this mean? It’s a testament to the fast and continuous growth of the ecommerce world‌. Thus, ecommerce businesses must continue to step up and bring their A-game. This includes not only perfecting their product and logistics but also making sure that their customer service is top-notch.

Why do Shopify Plus stores need excellent customer service?

Gone are the days when business success is all about product perfection—today’s businesses are also competing on creativity, marketing ideas, and customer relationships.

In all honestly, all businesses need excellent customer service. You want your customers to continue having a great experience with you—even after they’ve already purchased.

If your customers are happy, they will keep coming back. And if you retain your customers, they will continue contributing to your bottom line. Numbers show that 80% of your profits actually come from just 20% of your customers—and the probability of selling to existing customers is higher than getting new buyers.

Customer retention is just one thing, and the overall growth of a business is another. Research shows that companies that are great at customer experience are able to grow their revenue by 4-8% above the market.

Since Shopify Plus stores have a high volume of business, they probably have a lot of inquiries coming in. It will eventually come to a point wherein your in-house team will not be able to handle all support requests.

Here’s the hard truth. Businesses should not wait until the last minute to start looking for customer service solutions. After all, customer service quality is related to your business growth.

Unfortunately, improving customer service processes isn’t easy. It also takes time to hire the right people for the job—and to train them too. That’s why outsourcing your customer service responsibilities is a worthy investment to look into.

The top five benefits Shopify Plus stores will experience with outsourced customer service

Having a team of tried and tested, highly-skilled customer service experts working behind the scenes will give you much-needed peace of mind. You get to focus on your business and other priorities while handing off the customer service efforts to a dedicated team.

Here, our partners at LTV Plus discuss some of the benefits of outsourcing customer service on your Shopify Plus store.

1. Increased coverage from outsourced customer service

When you have a dedicated team focused on your customer service, you can with your customers across multiple channels 24/7.

What’s the big deal about 24/7 customer service? The digital transformation has led people to want answers right now, right away. In fact, 47% of users expect a webpage to load in 2 seconds or less.

With round-the-clock customer support, online users won’t have to wait for “business hours.” Even if you have customers in various countries and time zones, you can be confident that they will be catered to any time of the day.

It’s hard to achieve this if you don’t outsource. Why? Because you’ll need to hire, train, monitor, and evaluate. Your time will be focused on growing your customer service department instead of other business objectives.

2. Improvement in customer engagement

Customer engagement is a very valuable metric for ecommerce stores of today.

If you’re able to encourage any form of engagement at all from potential customers—whether it’s on social media, through email, or even talking to a Live Chat agent—these will all contribute to turning them into paying customers.

Did you know that companies with strong omnichannel customer engagement efforts retain around 89% of their customers? However, companies with weak strategies only retain 33%. Plus, customers who are regularly engaged contribute 23% of profitability, revenue, and overall relationship growth.

What does this tell us? Focusing on customer engagement is key to revenue growth.

Here’s an example. If you have a Live Chat feature on your Shopify Plus store, visitors can use it to get answers right away. This is more likely to turn into a sale compared to if the customer is left finding answers to a question.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that simply plugging in a Live Chat feature will automatically result in additional sales. You also need the right strategies for the right customer service channels. Use them properly and keep your audience engaged—it takes time, but it is worth it, and that’s why you should outsource it.

3. Get more insights about your potential and existing customers

The more information you have on your audience’s preferences and behaviour, the more informed your decisions will be.

Outsourcing your customer service responsibilities will give you more insights into your customers. Your dedicated team monitors all channels, enabling them to pull out data sets and make recommendations.

Here’s an example. Your customer service team reports that a lot of the inquiries they get are about site visitors complaining about your checkout process. You can use this information to optimise your checkout process to make it a pleasant experience for your customers. Then, you can work on cart recovery strategies to recover the potential revenue you lost.

4. Increased reach with multilingual support

If you’re only marketing to a specific demographic using a specific language, it will be hard to scale.

Translating your website and product pages can be an effective way to attract international customers, but customer service is a totally different matter to look into.

Did you know that 74% of customers are more likely to buy from a brand that offers post-purchase support in their own language? Of course, it’s way easier and more comfortable to express your concerns in your native language.

When you offer customer support in multiple languages, you can increase your sales and improve overall customer satisfaction throughout the customer journey. Hiring your own multilingual customer service team is not an easy task. Plus, you’ll need to produce the SOPs and scripts in all languages you want to make available. Consider outsourcing your entire customer support team, and you won’t have to worry about the nitty-gritty.

5. Save time and resources while getting results

This is one of the biggest perks of deciding to outsource your customer service. While it is an investment, you’ll be able to save time and money overall.

Instead of hiring and monitoring individual contracts for an in-house team, you can just hire an entire team with experienced and multilingual agents.

If you hire an in-house team, you will need resources (both time and money) to train them. Meanwhile, an outsourced team will take care of all the training and manpower for you.

Tips for outsourcing your customer service

If you do decide to eventually outsource your customer service (and trust us, you won’t regret it) for your growing Shopify Plus store, here are a few tips on how to maximise it.

Don’t outsource from scratch

What does this mean? Before you outsource this entire department, ‌have at least some first-hand experience with customer support responsibilities. After all, the team you will outsource will want to know more about the current customer support practices, and the current challenges you have with it.

Get to know your customers

Before you outsource customer service completely, it would be good if you know how they prefer to interact. Do they prefer live chat, email, or phone? Take some time to hone in on these details so you can brief your outsourced team properly.

Be involved in the background

Even though outsourced teams can generally function on their own, it’s still important to be involved now and then. Pay attention to the insights they deliver, and continue to be transparent so they know what you need.

Remain aligned with your outsourced team

Remember that customer service is an extension of your entire business. They act as the front liners. If you have any changes to your business model, pricing, or even products, it’s very important to convey this information to your team.

Take your Shopify Plus store to greater heights by outsourcing customer support services today. The benefits of outsourcing customer service are very impactful to Shopify Plus stores. It’s definitely a key strategy in your quest to take your ecommerce business to the next level.