| Is
Your On-Line Business Customer Friendly?
by: Philippa Gamse
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/
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