Using Amazon Buyer Messaging Services: Tips for Sellers to Maintain Perfect Account Health
Amazon’s Buyer-Seller Messaging Service is the only legitimate and recognized method to communicate with your customers from Amazon. As sellers already know, communication between sellers and Amazon customers takes place via Seller Central or the personal or business email associated with the account.
Generally, Amazon only allows you to contact customers to complete orders or to respond to their inquiries, and sellers are prohibited from promoting their brand or products through this service.
Let’s suppose a seller selects the “contact customer” option for customers who provided negative reviews. The predetermined message set by the seller that is used to contact customers will appear in this service along with possible responses from the customer and any follow-ups. As a reminder, Amazon temporarily suspended this capability at the beginning of 2021 and only recently started allowing sellers to reach their customers who provided 1 to 3 star ratings with predetermined templates provided by Amazon.
The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) has ranked Amazon #1 in customer satisfaction four times in last five years, according to their customer satisfaction reports. Sounds impressive, right? Because of this, Amazon shoppers expect a great customer experience and customer service, even without knowing that they are actually dealing with 3rd party sellers as opposed to Amazon directly. Amazon has stringent rules for answering customer messages, and as per Amazon Service Level Agreement (SLA), all sellers need to respond to customer messages within one calendar day, with no exceptions.
As one could imagine, the strict SLA restrictions put in place by Amazon regarding messaging services are creating difficulties for sellers, as they don’t take into account weekends, holidays, time off, or any other valid reasons for being unavailable. Responding to messages in a 24-hour time frame is a non-negotiable requirement for all sellers on Amazon, period.
So, it’s no surprise that many sellers are attempting to find ways of automating the customer response process or making it more accessible. Here are some of the possible options to do this.
Download the Seller App
The first and most secure way to avoid being non-compliant with Amazon’s SLA policies regarding messages is to download the mobile Seller App. This way, you will receive instant notifications when customers contact you and correspondence can be done over your smartphone. It’s a big advantage because as soon as some customer sends a message, you’re getting a notification on your phone and you can answer the message instantly. But as much this sounds nice, who wants their phone ringing about business on their time off?
Hire Staff
Some sellers are hiring staff solely to respond to messages during the weekends, holidays, and out-of-office days. Seller discretion is advised, specifically the level of priority given to delegating customer messages during time off, as well as whether the amount of traffic driven in the form of customer messages is even worth being outsourced.A recommended way of doing this way of responding to messages is providing a list of most common questions, inquiries, as well as already prepared generic email template or form where hired staff can quickly take action and respond. But of course, a negative side of this approach are mainly costs and time associated with hiring talent, whether offshore, contractors or full-time employees.
Email Auto-Response
Another way to be hands-off from customer messages during the weekends and free days is setting up an auto-response on your email account, a capability that most email providers support. The email address in question must be associated with your Amazon seller account, but an alias or new email address can create separation between different accounts.
The process is simple. By setting up an out-of-office or vacation responder in your email account, that response will be sent as an automatic reply to the customer message. If you don’t know how to do this, you can learn quickly by clicking here. The process is similar for any email service provider.
There are many ways to craft an auto-response message, but they typically start by thanking the customer and explaining that you’re out of the office, and providing assurance that follow up with the customer will occur on the first business day the seller is available. Personalizing your auto-response as much as possible helps avoid your reply not being recognized by the Amazon messaging system.
The downside of this method however is that you must follow up to responses on Amazon’s Seller Central platform in addition to email auto-responses, simply because Amazon dislikes auto-responses. Do not be deceived by Amazon’s notifications stating “No response needed” after an auto-response was sent to the customer. Failure to do so may impact your account health negatively.
In addition, auto-response emails could cause more technical difficulties when communicating with customers with their own auto-response set up, which could lead to an abnormal number of looping messages from both seller and customer. However, it’s pretty unusual that you will receive an automatic message from the customer, and the chance of this happening is low.
Another way to make responding to the messages easier is to use Amazon Seller Support templates and macros. By clicking on “Manage Email Templates” on the messaging service desk, you can easily set up templates and have pre-prepared generic responses ready for your customers.
Third Party Software
Depending on a seller’s needs, there is the option of subscribing to paid software to automate communication with customers. There are web apps available that can be integrated into marketplace communication platforms, such as Seller Central, and can even be aggregated into one dashboard, which makes things easy for sellers who are selling on multiple marketplaces. Paid software also has automated generic responses that can be utilized when away, and options to respond to customers directly from the app dashboard once available.
Key Takeaways
- Amazon is stringent regarding the SLA policy’s deadline for answering customer messages.
- Whatever solution is used, avoid being SLA non-compliant and respond to customers within a 24-hour time frame.
- Although there is a 24-hour window to respond to customer messages, customers prefer to receive a response within the first 4 hours (even if it’s an automated response).
- Choose a solution to respond to your messages according to your needs (for example, the number of messages you’re receiving).
- Keep in mind that Amazon is ranked #1 for the highest customer satisfaction and that your customers expect the same fast response and immediate action from sellers as they receive from Amazon.
What can we do for you?
While the goal is to run a successful Amazon business, the larger your inventory gets, the harder it becomes to monitor and deal with issues that may arise with keeping your account healthy and growing. At BellaVix, we are dedicated to helping you monitor your account, solving any possible problems regarding your account on your behalf, and ensuring your business grows in sales and ranking with our services. We have the experience and knowledge to take your account to the next level.
If you have additional questions or want us to help you on your Amazon journey, don’t hesitate to contact the BellaVix Team.
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