|
Is_Your_On Line_Business_Customer_Friendly
| Is Your On-Line Business Customer Friendly?
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:
1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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/
About the author:
Philippa Gamse, CyberSpeaker, is an internationally recognized
e-business strategist. Check out her free tipsheet "Beyond the
Search Engines" for 17 ideas to promote your Website:
http://www.CyberSpeaker.com/tipsheet.html Philippa can be
reached at (831) 465-0317 or mailto:pgamse@CyberSpeaker.com
|
|
| |
| |
