IMPROVING YOUR ONLINE CUSTOMER SERVICE

IMPROVING YOUR ONLINE CUSTOMER SERVICE

SEVEN MISTAKES BUSINESSES MAKE WITH EMAIL

THAT CAN COST YOU SALES

By S. Hunter

Businesses have had to rethink how they provide customer service when dealing with customers and prospects through e-mail. Unlike traditional sales where a customer often forms a decision about your business on the basis of the way they are personally greeted or treated by sales people, e-mail sales requires that you work much harder to convey a good impression. In many cases this means working to give your prospective customers a good impression of your service entirely through written communication.

This is true particularly in the case of international customers who may conduct business with you entirely through e-mail thereby eliminating long distance charges and time zone differences. Many businesses new to the Internet are unfamiliar with basic e-mail etiquette and need to know how to apply good customer service practices to e-mail. Here are 7 of the biggest mistakes businesses make and some ideas for improving your online customer service.

1. Failure to respond in a timely manner to questions about your products and services. When you are e-mailed a question make sure you follow up promptly; the same day ideally. The more time that goes by before you respond is to your disadvantage and is frustrating to your prospects. Get in the habit of checking your e-mail several times a day and responding promptly to prospects and customers alike. By doing so not only are you showing prospects you care about their individual inquiry, you are demonstrating the efficiency of your business and its attention to customer service.

2. Failure to follow up with information requests. Once you've responded promptly to a prospect's questions, make an effort to follow up as many as 3 times over the next few days. With the volume of e-mail that many people get, your response to the prospect may easily get lost or trashed. Following up with prospects makes sure that they received your information, gives them a sense of importance and conveys that you want to earn their business.

3. Failure to provide routinely answers to routinely asked questions online. Often businesses will receive the same questions about their products and services over and over again. There are three possible ways of handling this efficiently.

1) Place a Frequently Asked Questions and Answers area on your web site where prospects and customers can get the information they need without inquiring to you directly.

2) Make use of the stationary or template tools available in most e-mail programs to create a text document of the information. Then when you receive these commonly asked questions, simply use the "Reply with" tool and e-mail out the preconfigured template document.

3) Create an autoresponder that prospects can access and have sent directly to their e-mail box without having to contact you directly. Now of course, when prospects get the information from an autoresponder or from your web site, they haven't the need to contact you directly. This may save you time in responses but you can't easily follow up with prospects either, so consider this too when planning how to best respond to product/service inquiries.

4) Failure to respond to complaints. No business, no matter how efficient, operates without complaints of one form or another. When you receive a complaint or concern by e-mail, you can't simply ignore it. A reputable company responds to complaints just as quickly as they do to sales inquiries. Handled properly, a customer with a complaint may very well become a lifetime customer if you acknowledge their problem promptly and solve the problem to your mutual satisfaction.

5) Failure to provide an Information Request or Guest Book Form. By inviting visitors to sign a Guest Book or complete an Information Request Form at your web site you are able to obtain a considerable amount of information useful to your business for marketing purposes. These two types of forms can be used to; find out the interests of visitors to your site, determine how they found out about your site; their level of interest inyour products/services; whether they would like to be contacted by a representative; or perhaps if they would like to receive more information on your products and services. A very important aspect of these forms is to invite visitors to leave their e-mail address so you can send them your e-mail newsletter or updates on your products. This allows you to obtain valuable feedback from qualified prospects who've actually been to your site and although they didn't purchase today, you will be able to stay in contact for future purchase decisions. Remember, with e-mail you can stay in touch with these prospective customers at virtually no cost. Imagine if you were to mail a printed newsletter or product announcement to your customers, the cost would be staggering, but with e-mail it's fast, easy and economical. You simply can't afford to let the contact information of visitors slip out of your hands.

6) Failure to include a signature file on all of your e-mail responses. Whenever you respond to a prospect or customer inquiry, always make sure you have a signature block on your reply mail. A signature block, or signature file is simply a stamp that automatically gets added to the bottom of your outgoing messages. Check your e-mail software tools to see how to do this. Your signature file should contain your name, your company name, your phone and fax numbers, your web site address and reasons for people to visit.

7) Failure to reply to orders with a follow up message that the order was received and when processing of the order will take place. When you receive an order with credit card information make sure you promptly let that customer know you received it. This is a common courtesy that your customers will appreciate. When the order is received, you should immediately send back a reply thanking the customer for the order, confirm what the order was for, and offer the approximate time required to process and ship the order. With more and more people getting Internet access every day, its important that your business be prepared to handle the growth of online customer service.

Sandi Hunter is Co-Founder of Worldprofit at http://www.worldprofit.com

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