Does customer service exist in ecommerce?

Can customer service and ecommercecoexist? This seems like a very corny question to ask. The answer, surprising as it might sound, is a big ‘yes’. The truth is that, customer service and ecommerce are inseparable twins.

One major reason for which most people tend to think that customer service is not needed in ecommerce business is that it has no salesmen working in a physical store. People think of ecommerce solutions as ecommerce websites on which one displays a product and sells it.

This is true, but only up to a very small extent. Ironically, the role of customer service is more accentuated in ecommerce, because there may be no salesman, but serving the invisible, faceless customer is all the more challenging in the online space.

Actually, the ecommerce company starts customer service much before a product gets sold. It all starts with getting the ecommerce site to get noticed. At this stage, some kind of customer service starts.

And then, once the customer makes the purchase using the ecommerce shopping cart, another level of customer service starts, because the website ecommerce has to ensure that the product is delivered properly.

Since the ecommerce web site has to induce the customer to buy on it, and once that is done, take care of the remaining aspects, customer service, although it does not appear so, is more pronounced in ecommerce business than in the conventional, brick and mortar model.