On Internet Business

Online Customer Service

Posted by Michael under Online Retail, Social Media

It seems that online buyers have even worse experiences than face-to-face consumers, as a Harris Interactive survey, reported by Zen International, discovered that 75% of those who buy online had problems using websites to make purchases in the past year.

It’s astonishing that this is the case because businesses are likely to lose immediate sales but also the domino effect of bad experiences being reported on social media for future potential customers to discover. And that’s a likely scenario as 13% of people said the had reported on bad experiences in 2009, against 8% in 2008. And 74% of people who responded to the survey said that negative information about a company that they found online would affect the likelihood of their doing business with that company in future.

So what practical steps can be taken to ensure your business offers not just great products but also great customer service?

• Encourage customer feedback – make it easy for customers to tell you what they think about you. The customer is always right, but even if they aren’t they will still be telling people about the poor product or service they encountered. So you need to engage with your customers and understand them, so you’re ready to respond effectively.
• Empower customer service representatives – the front end of your business is the people who deal face-to-face, by email, or by phone, with your clients. Is it worth arguing over small amounts of money? Is it worth losing a customer? Allow customer service people to fix problems swiftly and to ensure happy customers – don’t be a company that palms off problems, never responds to queries or creates a labyrinth of obstacles for people to get through before they can let you know they are not happy, because if they don’t tell you, they will tell the world.
• Monitor customer satisfaction – set up a questionnaire so that you can monitor and track customer satisfaction.  Make it easy and quick so your customer doesn’t mind completing it and offer an incentive, perhaps one respondee a month gets a freebie, so that they know you are giving something back in return for the information they supply.
• Monitor social media – a great tool for monitoring customer comments is tweetdeck which allows you to quick and easily see what is being said about you and reply to customers using this form of social media. It is the customer that now decides the method of communication and businesses need to join the conversation. Such systems of monitoring also allow you to head off problems before they develop, for example by telling clients how you’re going to deal with deliveries over a postal strike, which allows them to know that their business is important to your business.

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