SolveYourProblem
Article Series:
Niche Marketing Opportunities
Poor
Customer Service Will Ruin Your Business
by Jeff Cohen
One
of the quickest ways to kill your internet business, or
any business for that matter, is to offer poor
customer service. When people take the time to complain about
some part of your product or service they will have been stewing
away for a while before they decided to contact you. If they
can't get hold of your or you don't respond to their communication,
you'll end up with a very angry customer. When that angry customer
has had enough and decides to let the world know about your
terrible product they'll attract attention like bees to a honey
pot.
The
last thing you want for your business is bad press. Bad
news spreads quicker than good news... People love to have
something to gripe about and if that gripe is about your product,
you're going to loose sales very quickly.
Before you can decide on a good customer service system, you
need to be absolutely certain your product is top quality and
will exceed your customer’s expectations. Once you are sure
of your product you can be fairly certain that customer service
issues will be related to:
- Payment
problems.
- The
customer purchased the wrong product.
- Installation
issues for software products.
- Setup
problems for a web service.
- Delivery
problems for a physical product.
You
need to decide on some basic ground rules for your customer
service department. For example:
> Will you handle all customer service issues yourself, or
will you hire somebody to do it for you?
> How quickly will you reply? If it is going to be longer
than a few hours, you need to send an immediate email acknowledging
the issue and stating that you will reply within 12, 24 or
48 hours, what ever you decide on.
Next you need to decide on the actual method you will use
to receive and reply to customer service issues. The three
most popular customer support systems are:
1)
Normal Email
As part of your website you could have a web page with your
contact details and simply state your email address as one
of the methods to get hold of you.
Bear in mind that email harvesting programs
will get your email address and over time you will be inundated
with spam.
To get around this you could use a small graphic which contains
your email address, or you could display it in this format: "me
[AT] mywesite.com" with a note to your customers to replace
[AT] with @.
Another point to consider is using a unique email address
for customer service issues. You don't want to mix this email
with any other accounts, keep it separate so you can keep track
of it.
2)
Feedback scripts
There are simple feedback scripts which are freely available
online and which allow your customers to contact you without
you having to display an email address anywhere on your website.
Your email address will not even be embedded in hidden form
fields or other HTML tags.
These scripts allow you to use a form on a contact page into
which your customer can enter their contact details and the
nature of their customer service issue. The script will then
email these details to your email address.
While these scripts are more secure than leaving your email
address visible on a web page, they don't offer a means of
tracking support issues.
3)
Help Desk scripts
By far the most professional method of providing effective
customer support is to use a help desk system. Your customer
will have to open an account before they can log a support
request which eliminates most non-genuine support issues. After
opening an account, they can log a support issue which is automatically
given a unique identification and the details stored in a database.
The customer is immediately sent an email explaining that their
support issue has been logged and they can expect a reply in
12, 24, or 48 hours, or whatever time span you set.
The beauty of a help desk support system is that even if your
email fails for some reason, you won't miss any support requests.
All you have to do is login to your support desk administration
panel and all the unanswered support requests received will
be displayed. Your task is then to answer each support issue
and the system will automatically mark the issue as closed.
# # # # # SolveYourProblem.com : 2007
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