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Customer service is
increasingly seen as one of the most valuable uses for a commercial World Wide
Web site. Your Web site is available on a 24 hour, seven days a week basis. So
it is well worth exploring ways in which your customers can virtually “serve
themselves," without the need for overtime staff, or lengthy voice mail
procedures.
James Feldman is President of
JFA, Inc., an online business offering high quality and unique gift items
including automatic watch winders, Grundig shortwave pocket radios, and
nitroglycerine pill fobs. The JFA Web site has been online since 1997, and has
doubled its income every year - it’s now a multi-million dollar e-commerce
enterprise.
Jim, who's also a professional
speaker and expert on customer service, highlighted for me how the online buying
experience differs from the bricks-and-mortar model.
Buying online eliminates the
physical presence and personality of the salesperson from the process. This
makes the Web site copy critical in creating a one-to-one relationship with the
customer or prospect.
Which echoes one of my favorite
mantras:
Every page of your site
should be written from the visitor’s point of view, not yours.
A visitor should be able to look
at your offerings, and immediately answer the questions:
“Why me?” - that is, is your
Web site the right place for me?
“Why should I care?” - does
this copy convince me that you can meet my needs?
It’s much easier and immediate
to jump from Web site to Web site than to move between real-world stores. So the
visitor has far more freedom of choice online. Jim says that the challenge for
customer service is therefore very clearly to focus on one customer, one
purchase at a time. E-customers expect great service, with little or no direct
interaction. They will tolerate some mistakes, but not many.
Jim offers five rules for
effective online customer service:
- Be accessible.
Show very clearly on your site all the ways that your customer can contact
you - including e-mail, phone and fax numbers, and your office hours.
And, if it’s practical for
your business, be personal - give your visitors a real person to call who
has a name, as opposed to sales@mycompany.com
Of course, if you’re
really upscale, you can include a “Call-me” button on your site.
- Return every e-mail or
phone call in the same day,
as far as reasonably possible. This may sound simplistic, but a recent
experiment with the top Fortune 100 companies showed that nearly a third
failed to respond to e-mail sent through their Web site within one month!
Some of these companies still don’t provide a usable e-mail address on
their sites at all.
- Acknowledge all orders.
Send e-mail confirmations (this can be done very effectively with
autoresponders), and if you’re shipping actual products, give tracking
numbers and expected delivery dates.
- Provide a clear return
policy, honor it and
learn from it. This may give you more information about what’s working and
what’s not. Jim’s products are sometimes returned with no explanation,
so his staff always call the customer to establish and resolve the problem.
- Expect more phone calls.
Jim says: “Customers can’t read or write!” If your Web site traffic
and response rates grow (which is, of course, what we want), so will the
volume of phone calls, whatever your business or industry.
Regardless of the site
quality, clear returns and privacy policies, secure servers, etc., people
still require human interaction. All of my clients report talking to
customers on the phone, and walking them through the Web site, where their
questions are clearly answered. Maybe these psychological barriers will
lessen over the next few years, but right now, they are very much there.
If you can get the customer
service aspects of your business working well, there’ll be a definite bottom
line impact. Jim is quite clear that his business has grown substantially
through repeat business and referrals from satisfied customers.
And in contrast, we can see the
impact of poor customer service and fulfillment procedures in many of the
dot.coms that are currently failing. Jim says that people buy things online in
the expectation of getting something more valuable than the actual money they
spend.
Does your Web site do
this??
JFA Inc. can be found at http://www.jfainc.com/
© Copyright Philippa Gamse.
All rights reserved.
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