Providing Great Customer Service

Customers are the life blood of business and it is very important you provide the best customer experience possible to enjoy the fruits of repeat business and a great reputation in your market. If you are starting out selling online whilst working in a full or part time job you need to be organised so that you can effectively deal with customers.

You will inevitably start receiving customer emails once you start selling with questions and queries coming in thick and fast so how and when are you going to deal with them? Ideally you will need to set aside an hour a day to reply to all emails from your customers or perhaps check your email in the morning and evening so nobody has to wait too long for a response. While we are on the subject or checking email, try to get in the habit of checking it just a few times a day as it can be such a time waster and stop you from getting on with more productive tasks such as split testing and adding new products to your store.

If you have added a telephone number to your website, the best thing to do is have call filtering set up so the customer presses a different button for each department, such as sales, product questions, accounts and technical support. If you are unable to take live calls having a telephone number on the site can help still help with conversions so if you can’t answer, switch on your voicemail and let the customer know that they will definitely receive a call back from you.

When I started selling online I loved taking sales calls and would actually divert all incoming calls to my mobile which had a record feature. This meant I could actually just record all the customer details and run the payment through when I was back in the office and I didn’t miss a single sale. I literally took calls whilst ice skating, going through a car wash, on holiday in Amsterdam, I would take a sales call anywhere!

After 2 years of this my wife and kids lost a little patience with me so I finally handed over the job to an outsourced company who took all the calls and put the sales through on my website for me, giving me a life again!
So you may want to find a company who can take your calls for you whilst you work in your normal job until such time as you can afford to live off your ecommerce store profits.

The bottom line is you need to provide a professional appearance to your customers and give them with a rapid response that fulfils their needs, do this and your business reputation will take care of itself. When we sold TV wall mounts we regularly received calls from large stores such as Comet (UK circuit city equivalent) and Tesco asking us to help their customer out, purely as we were the most trusted company in the market with a great reputation for quality customer service.

Once you start to see a pattern of incoming queries from customers you should be adding the questions and answers to an FAQ section on your store front so customers don’t have to contact you for an answer every time. If you do this consistently over a period of time and include a clear link to your FAQ in your customer emails it will no doubt reduce your time spent dealing with the same repetitive questions.

Treat your customers as you would like to be treated is really the message here. If you have a returns policy of 14 days and a customer calls you on day 15, let them know they are outside the normal return period but you will make an exception – sure you get a return you don’t really want but you also get a happy customer who feels you have done her a favour and is liable to shop with you again in the future.

One of the biggest customer issues is people chasing their orders. Nowadays everyone wants their order yesterday although you will find the patience of your customers vary from market to market. Try to give accurate delivery times on your Website and don’t quote times you simply cannot adhere too – this only gets the customer annoyed and will inevitably result in some order cancellations.

If you are not taking the calls personally, make sure your staff are knowledgable in all your products. There is nothing worse than ringing to ask a question about a product you have seen on a website and the person who answers the phone is clueless. People want to see that you know your products well and can help and advise them on what to buy – you need to be perceived as the experts and not just a company that has thrown up a website with some stuff on to try and sell.

So to summarise here are 10 customer service best practises: