How to Provide Online Customer Support

Online customer support can make or break your business. Customer service excellence begins with having a vision of your business model that places customer experience first and organizes your website and your business to realize that vision.

Difficulty: Moderately Challenging

Instructions

See What Works

1. Look carefully at the business websites that impress you the most or have the greatest reputations for customer support and customer loyalty. Begin by making note of routine operations that are something other than customer support, such as marketing, order processing, product search and browse, sales and payment processing. That's where excellent customer support begins.

2. Focus on the ways in which excellent customer support will build your business and drill down on them with your employees. Before the Internet, customer support predicted customer retention and it still does. But now, with the global transparency of the web and online customer ratings and reviews, anything less than a five star rating will drive new customers away from your website.

Give Your Customers What They Want

3. Communicate seamlessly and proactively with your customers when they place an order to verify the details, charges, shipping timetable and tracking number. Ideally, this communication will be automated between your shopping cart and your shipping vendor.

4. Tell your customers when to expect their shipments and ask them to let you know directly if there are any problems with their orders when they arrive. Provide an easy way for them to get in touch at that point.

5. Go the extra mile, whenever a problem occurs, to remedy the problem to the customer's satisfaction. You'll never do your business any good arguing with your customers and a re-shipment, gift certificate or refund may keep them from giving you negative feedback and ensure that they and others come back to you as customers.

6. Use your shippers' eCommerce tools, like online tracking and delivery confirmation to protect yourself from scammers. Provide the information in a pro-active, matter of fact way in your shipping notification emails to reduce problems while also giving you peace of mind when a customer does report a problem.

7. Supplement your routine website operations with help pages, FAQs and help archives, but don't let help pages get in the way of your business. Use audio, video or illustrations, if applicable, to supplement help text.

Tips & Warnings

• Never organize your site so that a customer has to email or call you to do business with you. Amazon, which has stellar customer loyalty ratings, relies very little on emails or interventions. The trick is to make sure things go smoothly for your customers right from the start and then provide for direct human contact in those rare instances where something goes wrong.

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