Of course there's the old saying - if someone's happy with your product they'll tell one or two other people about it, and if they're unhappy: they'll tell at least ten. With the growing importance of the internet, this saying has not lost in validity. The unhappy folk in question will now blog about it and write complaints on local service sites and if someone ever gets it into their head to run a quick search on your business - well, they'll see it. And complaints aside - any good business is built on happy customers. Good customer service is the way to achieve this. As we wrote last time: a customer complaint is an opportunity - if you deal with it effectively you will have glued your customer to your side more certainly than if you had simply done everything right the first time.
So what things do we need to think about to achieve good customer service and how does online service differ from traditional?
There is no personal touch. So you need to compensate for this. How? Personalize as much as possible. If you hold a correspondence through email, don't send them basic form letters, include as much personal information related to their particular case as possible. Not long ago I had to use the services of a very well respected large business and I was appalled to find three quarters of the content of the letters they were sending me did not apply to my case. At first I couldn't understand, it never occured to me, and I tried to understand how everything they were saying applied to me, I read the letter over and over until it finally dawned on me - it doesn't apply, they simply sent me one of their general form letters. I'll never use their services again.
What else should you do? Keep the customers in the loop, talk to them. Send them short messages thanking them for their order, telling them when it will be shipped, telling them it has been shipped, offering them the opportunity to join your free newsletter. I think this will change in another year or two, as people begin to see it as computerized and meaningless, then something else will have to be done, but for now - this is still an important step.
Because of the impersonal nature of online business, and the fact your customer will not ever likely meet one of your sales people face to face to ask them a question, you have to make it easy for them to answer their own questions OR make it easy for them to get in touch with you to ask. So you should have a good FAQ page, and you should make it easy to find contact information. At the same time you will be reassuring them that you really exist.
Finally, ask them about their experience doing business with you. We touched this last time, and I take this opportunity to reiterate: customers are unlikely to reach out and tell you if they didn't like doing business with you, they will just take their business elsewhere, so you have to reach out to them. You can gather from this important information about how to improve your service, and at the same time fix any problems that might have arisen, and possibly save yourself the loss of a customer. Not to mention what this does to add the personal touch that is lacking in the virtual world.
