As we gear up for the holiday season, here are some tips for ensuring that you are providing phenomenal customer service:

1. Deliver an exceptional experience: Strive to provide extraordinary service that exceeds customer expectations, encouraging them to return for future purchases.
2. Be timely, honest, and respectful: Respond to customer inquiries promptly and with integrity, always maintaining a respectful tone.
3. Take ownership of your responsibilities: Handle all customer contacts related to your products, pricing, availability, technical support, and order fulfillment.
4. Provide comprehensive support: Be prepared to assist with any issues related to your products, including those on third-party platforms (e.g., iPad or Android versions).
5. Address feedback proactively: Pay attention to customer experiences with your personnel, policies, and processes, including those of any third parties involved in your product sales or fulfillment.
6. Maintain clear communication: Handle all service or content update communications clearly and effectively.
7. Aim for consistency across channels: Ensure that your customer service for products sold through Amazon is at least as responsive and available as your most favorable customer service offered through any other sales channels.
8. Be prepared for ratings and feedback: Remember that customers may rate your products and performance, and these ratings may be made public.
9. Respect Amazon's role: Understand that Amazon will handle certain aspects of customer service, such as payment processing and site-related issues.
10. Embrace the holiday spirit: During the busy holiday season, maintain a positive and helpful attitude, remembering that great customer service can make a significant difference in a customer's overall shopping experience.

In order to optimize metrics before the Holiday season, I have included some of our FAQs around customer service metrics.

What does it mean if my insights show NA?

If any of the customer service insights show NA, then it means either you haven’t had any orders in the last 4 weeks or you haven’t yet had 4 weeks of orders. These insights are based on the past 4 weeks of data, so there needs to be at least 4 weeks’ worth of order data to display the insights so they are meaningful.

What does my “over the last four weeks” mean?

For each insight, we take your average performance in the insight for the past 4 weeks, and show you how you are doing today compared to your past 4 weeks average. This allows you to see if you are above or below your average performance. This can be extremely helpful as it will average out your performance for the past month so you are able to understand if your performance is getting better or worse over time compared to how you regularly perform. Since each insight is calculated for the past 4 weeks, it is like comparing your day over day performance.

Will these insights be used to restrict my selling privileges or have any other negative impact to my account?

No. These insights are provided to give you an insight into three of the most critical customer experience dimensions to customers, and should be used as educational insights to help you improve your customer experience for your buyers.

Why are these customer service insights on Feedback Manager (FBM)?

Your seller star rating and feedback you manage on FBM are customer service and fulfillment related feedback. We want to give you more insight into your performance in these areas along with customer feedback so you can be given a holistic and accurate measure of how you are performing with data and how customers perceive this performance.

What should I do if I want to improve any of my customer service insights or am below the store average?

There is an option next to the insights on FBM called See My Inbox, which links to your Message Inbox. There, you will be able to action unanswered messages and customer inquiries, and manage your customer support.

What does a 0 value mean?

0 value means you have not received a negative experience in this insight. For example, for contacts received for unit shipped, it means you have received no preventable contacts for any of the items you have fulfilled.

To learn more please click HERE.

We would love to hear from our sellers about how you keep these metrics up. Please provide feedback in the comments below.