Exceptional Customer Service: The Key to Getting Return Business
Guest Post by Erin Steiner
The key to building a successful business isn’t having the fanciest website or the most expensive and sought-after product. Those things are great, of course, but if you don’t have at least solid customer service skills, you can bet your bottom dollar that every last one of your customers would rather shop at a simpler website with cheaper products – even if those products are inferior to yours. So how, in the world of online business and web-based sales methods, do you practice the best possible customer service?
It’s important to get it right!
1. Make it as Personal as Possible
NOTE: Job-Seekers be of the mindset to apply these tips to your interview as well as how to interact with your management staff upon being hired to further your career.
Nobody wants to feel like a number or, worse, a dollar sign with legs. The best way to prevent that from happening is to make your customer service as personal as possible. This includes things like not forcing your customer service representatives to stick to a script and including code on your sales pages that tracks your buyers’ previous purchases and browsing history. If your business is offline, simple sales techniques like recognizing a customer on site and remembering the last thing he or she bought in your shop can do wonders for your customer service scores. Deskero has a great post on this called “3 Tips on How to Make Online Customer Support Personal.”
2. Follow Up
The internet has been all over Amazon lately for some of its business practices. One thing most people can agree on, though, is that the company’s customer service is top notch and is something to which everyone should aspire. One of the keys to their customer service set-up is the follow up. Within a couple of weeks of completing a purchase, every customer is sent an email asking about his or her shopping experience with Amazon and their impression of the product purchased. A quick email to your customers asking these same things goes a long way!
You can *feel* this way…just don’t *sound* this way!
3. Make the Experience Safe
Even if you have the best and most polished sales methods on the web, if people don’t feel safe using your site, you won’t ever sell anything. This means having a thorough privacy policy and doing things to make sure that huge security breaches like Heartbleed aren’t keeping you from protecting your people. The WePay Blog talked about how to do this recently in their blog post: “WePay and Heartbleed (CVE-2014-0160).”
4. Make the Experience Easy
If your customers can’t find what they’re looking for, they’re going to shop elsewhere. Make sure your stores and websites are easy to navigate and that buying from you is as simple as possible. A customer shouldn’t have to click through dozens of pages to find what they are looking for or, worse, to get to their shopping carts. Simplify the process as much as possible.
These are just four sales techniques you can use to ensure that your customer service is top notch, especially when selling online. Have you found a way to deliver great customer service? Share your tips in the comments section!
Erin Steiner covers topics ranging from pop culture to personal finance for websites all over the web.
Building relationships with your clientele leads to the Smooth Sale!
Read Addtional Strategies and Techniques:
Nice Girls DO Get the Sale: Relationship Building That Gets Results, Sourcebooks
HIRED! How to Use Sales Techniques to Sell Yourself On Interviews, Career Press
