Online Customer Service

To acquire new customers typically costs money, whether it is online or off, so there needs to be methods in retaining and building their long term value.  True online customer service is defined as all the activities conducted once the customer completes a purchase.  This is referring specifically to the conduct of the customer service team towards their customers.  

Customer service makes or breaks online businesses.  In a world where transactions are driven through a channel where no customer interaction occurs, the customer service function must bring the human element to the business and will build a loyal following, if managed properly.  No online business should underestimate the value of this function.

Key areas to focus customer service efforts:

Customer touch points.  Online businesses must have processes to ensure a high standard of communication to customers in situations where their expectation must be changed and managed.  This is very common when orders are delayed for various reasons i.e. back orders. 

Having processes which ensure the over communication to clients during situations where the order cannot be fulfilled is one powerful method to ensure they remain loyal.  This method has been one of the reasons for Amazon’s huge success.  Their investment in customer service infrastructure has heavily contributed to their growth. 

Management of returns.  The best returns policy is a simple returns policy.  For those visitors not used to shopping online, it is critical to remove as many barriers to their buying process as possible.  If the product they purchase is not right, what are the steps they need to take to return the product?  Is it easy?  How much will it cost to return the product? 

Visitor and customer enquiries.  It is common to have some visitors who will refuse to complete the first purchase online.  They will use your website as a catalogue and will call your support team to complete the order.  The conduct of the customer service team becomes important making sure they take the order promptly and professionally.  The good news is, this customer type will only need to do this one time.  Once they are reassured there is a real business with real people behind it, there will be enough confidence to conduct future purchases online.

Exceeding expectation.  This is where you surprise customers by over delivering on their expectations.  Methods to achieve this are:

• Deliver the order ahead of customer expectation.  When you are setting your delivery time lines on the website, be conservative, “under promise, and over deliver”. 
• Delivering the next size up.  If a visitor orders a “Medium” sized product, and it is out of stock (thus threatening a back order), send the customer a “Large” instead.  The margin may be slightly compromised however the cost savings in management of the back order along with the happiness of the customer, out way the slight margin degradation.    This has proven to be an effective method adopted by Foodtown Online. 
• Free Gift/Sample.  Providing customers free gifts/samples, not only introduces new product ranges on offer, but it becomes another tool to promote credibility and build customer relations (another Foodtown online method).  
• Recovery.  Your ability to recover when you are contacted by unhappy customers is also key in building loyal customers.  Though this is normally managed in an ad hoc manner, the customer service team need to be empowered to deal with customer issues promptly and professionally.

Online customer service becomes one of the fundamental methods in which to build your online brand and long term loyalty.  If you are thinking about using a development team to build an expensive online loyalty points system, save your time and money and re invest both into a customer service function.

If you have an example of how a website has let you down once you made a purchase, let me know!

Watch this space, my article next week will discuss more on the so called loyalty points systems which apparently lock online customers and builds on lifetime value.