How Many Customer Queries do Online Businesses Get?

Imagine that you start an e-commerce business tomorrow. It’s just you, your partner, and a garage full of stock. You both work full-time and you’ll be spending most of your — very limited — free time packing and shipping orders.

What will you do about customer queries?

It’s a question that all new business owners must deal with and one that usually worries small business owners. After all, if you’re working around the clock and don’t have much free time, there’s a genuine worry that you’ll either need to sacrifice your sleep, cut back on your hours at work, or disappoint your customers.

But the good news is that there probably won’t be as many customer queries as you expect, and if you follow a few simple steps, you can reduce them further.

How Many Customer Queries Do Online Businesses Get?

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The above scenario is one that a close friend of mine recently found themselves in. They wanted to start a business with their partner but were worried that they would be inundated with customer queries.

They assumed they would have several customer emails a day to begin with and that these would progress to around 10 to 15 daily queries when they were processing 100 weekly orders.

It seemed like a fair assumption to make, but as I later informed him, it was way off.

In actual fact, my friend’s business had just 3 to 4 weekly emails at that point, and he only progressed to more than 10 daily queries when he was processing over 1,000 weekly orders.

He’s not the exception, either. He followed a few key steps that helped to keep those queries low and ensure that he wasn’t spending his days as a customer support rep.

The Uncertainty Principle

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The Uncertainty Principle is something I created to highlight an issue that so many business owners overlook.

When you’re selling a physical product in a physical store, you’re giving customers a chance to pick it up and feel it. They can smell it, feel the weight, understand the quality, and see what it looks like. If they have any questions, they can just ask the shop assistant. It’s more of a dedicated experience and it’s why more retail customers walk out of a store with shopping bags in their hands.

When you’re selling online, you can’t offer any of those benefits, and so your customers are filled with uncertainty. Maybe they want to know whether a product is vegan-friendly. Maybe they want to know if it has any allergens or whether it can be packaged as a gift.

Your goal is to answer all those questions as quickly and as clearly as you can. If you don’t, they will either leave your website or send you emails.

One of the reasons my friend got so few customer queries was because he packed his website with product images, descriptive texts, and FAQs. He answered every possible question they could have, and the only thing left to know was usually, “Why is my order delayed?”.

Speaking of which…

Where’s My Order?

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If you can answer this question without the customer needing to send an email, you will save your business countless hours every week.

The business is rarely at fault for a slow or lost order and yet the customer always holds them accountable.

To remedy this issue, do the following:

1. Send Confirmation Emails: As soon as an order is placed and shipped, the customer should get a confirmation email. This can be done automatically through most e-commerce platforms.
2. Ship Quickly: Prioritize fast shipments. Everyone is used to the speed of Amazon Prime and other rapid services, and so they don’t have patience for slower shipments. Try to ship as quickly as you can.
3. Be Realistic: If you can’t ship quickly, let your customers know. Make it clear that you’re a smaller company and/or sell a more specialized product, and so it may take longer to arrive. Place this information in your checkout page and confirmation emails so that the customer can’t overlook it.
4. Connect with the Courier: Most courier services will allow you to input the customer’s details so that they receive an email/text from the courier when their parcel is on its way. They should also be given a tracking number. That way, if the parcel is delayed the customer will hassle the courier and not you.
5. Delays: If you’re experiencing any delays, don’t bury your head in the sand and hope that no one will complain. Send automated emails to all customers who will likely experience a delay and apologize in advance. You’ll find that customers will respect you more when you are upfront with them, even if it means they need to wait a little longer to get what they ordered.

No Live Chat

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I always advocate for the use of Live Chat. It gives customers a direct link to your support team and ensures they can get answers to their questions without a long wait.

However, for every person who uses Live Chat to get a helpful answer and complete a sale, there will be half a dozen others who use it to ask questions you’ve already answered on your site, complain about your layout, and try to sell you backlinks, SEO, and wholesale products.

If you can afford to pay someone to staff your Live Chat, do it. Not only will it help to convert a few more customers but it will also give you some valuable insights into commonly asked questions and consumer habits.

If you’re operating with limited funds and time, you can afford to skip Live Chat until your finances make it a more viable option.

Summary: Dealing with Customer Queries as a New Business

I run several online businesses but I’m fortunate in that I work with a large team. I don’t need to deal with customer queries as I have freelancers, part-time employees, and logistics companies to do that for me.

Optimizing DTC Operations For Success with Ricky Choi #ThisWeekWithSabir

If you want to do the same, I recommend reading this guide with operations expert Ricky Choi or watching this video with digital agency owner Shay Berman. It means that you can focus on branding, marketing, and operations while a specialized team handles the support side of things.

If you don’t have the money or the means to hire a team, just implement some of the strategies outlined above, start small, and then scale from there.

As noted above, you will probably get far fewer queries than you expect, and when you eventually reach a point when the queries are too much to handle on your own, you should be big enough and rich enough to scale up.