Last month we discussed building credibility and trust at your website, so that visitors feel comfortable buying from you. That is half of
battle. The more important part is increasing lifetime value of each customer, that is, getting your one-time buyers to be repeat customers. There are many factors that go into this: marketing; product quality; and consumable nature of product or service you sell. However, if you have poor (or non-existent) customer service, you can forget about repeat business. Since none of us is running a large company (I assume) and don’t have much of a budget—if any—for customer service, all of tips and resources in this article are either free or low-cost. Customer service for small businesses is typically provided via sweat equity.
Ground Rules First, some common sense ground rules for providing good customer service: 1.The more ways you have to contact you more assured potential and repeat buyer will feel in coming back to your site. We will look at many of these ways in this article. 2.Respond quickly! There is no point to having many methods of contacting you (e.g., email, chat, voice mail) and then fail to respond in a timely manner. It will just turn people off. Better to have less contact methods and be diligent in responding to issues or requests. 3.Be proactive. Since we want to minimize amount of time spent with customer service (and so do our customers!), provide as many ways as possible to answer common questions and problems as possible. Obvious solutions to this are FAQs and email updates. 4.Ask customers how you’re doing. Get feedback about your customer service from those who use it. Are FAQs comprehensive? How hard was it to get in touch? Did you get your problem solved? This will enable you to improve your service. You may have to offer a freebie to get people to respond. There are many free sites that provide surveys and polls for your website, including: http://www.pollwizard.com; http://www.visitorpoll.com; http://www.pollit.com; http://polls.whatiz.com
Now that we have that out of way, let’s discuss common low-cost methods of customer service that we can use.
EMAIL Yes, this is an obvious one, and is a minimum requirement for every website. You should have a specific email address for support requests (typically support@yourdomain.com). I have all email to this address forwarded to my MS Outlook mailbox and I use filters to color it red. This way I can take a quick glance and see if anyone is requesting help.
FAX Some people like to use FAX, especially if they don’t want to send messages from their work email. You don’t need to own a FAX machine; you can get free FAX receive service that goes straight to your email. The two popular services are http://www.efax.com, and http://j2.com. You will have to pay if you want to send faxes.
USER FORUM In old days it was called a bulletin board system (BBS), now they are user forums or groups. This is a great way to provide support, mostly because if you can get enough people to use it, your customers will help each other out! People will request answers to problems that others may have already had, and they can respond with answer. However—you must make an effort to participate in group and answer questions as much as possible, at least once a day. You can also post updates and message digests to common problems in user group as well. The best place to start a group is at http://groups.yahoo.com.
