How to Offer Superior Online Customer Service

It’s true to say that good customer service is vital to a company’s survival. What’s relatively new to this business axiom is that well designed and responsive customer service is even more critical for online commerce. Your customers are global and for most of them you are an anonymous seller. Your smile, your staff, your shop ambience are not going to help you win and keep customers online. As with so much else on the Internet, performance is what counts.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

1. Start by becoming your own customer. Walk through every aspect of the website and see if everything works and is comfortable to use. Yes, you pay a website expert to maintain your site, but it’s your business.

2. Make it easy to buy. Once your customer has made a selection and entered the shopping cart, the last thing you want to do is get in the way of the sale. Make all marketing survey questions optional and give them an incentive to answer them. This may be the most important part of your site to walk through yourself. If the process of purchasing isn’t effortless, your business will suffer.

3. Understand the importance of fast, effective website navigation. Navigation through a website is simply the ways your customer moves from one page or function to another. Your customer sees a beautiful sweater and wants to get a look at all the color options. She clicks on the Colors link. If she goes immediately to an image of the sweater in a variety of colors, you’re one step closer to a sale. If the link fails and she can’t move forward, chances are she will click not just off that page but off your website. After all, there are lots of places to buy sweaters online.

4. Carefully consider all the ways you encourage your customer to contact you. Let’s say you have a Contact Us page, with a mailing address, an email address and a phone number. You also have a Live Chat option, so customers can get immediate live help or answers to their questions. You also offer a feedback link and a link to your website expert, so customers can report website problems. That’s six common ways to let your customer contact you. Every one of those contact points needs to be regularly maintained. If a customer responds to your invitation and gets no response, you’ve created a negative shopping experience.

5. Use an auto responder as a first contact, not your only response. You’ve probably received at least one auto response at some time. You email a business with a question and before you shut down your computer there is an email in your inbox thanking you for the contact. It’s a nice, positive gesture, but it’s not an answer to a question. Think of it as a placeholder. It tells your customer that you have received their email and can expect a real answer soon. Even if the response email is also a form answer rather than a customized one, don’t neglect the follow up on this important process.

6. Remember that there will always be a question that doesn’t fall into a handy category. Plan for it. This service separates the OK business from the excellent one. When a customer receives an email that is clearly an individualized response to their unique question, the marketing bump is hard to overstate. Yes, it takes some effort and expense, but it is the mark of a real professional.

7. Write this down and keep it where you can see it every day: it is poor customer service to promise more than you can deliver. As you begin to weigh all the possible customer service options you could offer, be very pragmatic. Only offer what you can truly deliver now. As you grow and create a loyal customer base, you can add services. Your repeat customers will know you always do what you promise to do and that is a solid gold foundation for a thriving business.