What does having a reputation for providing great Online Customer Support buy you at the end of the day?
1. Happy customers.
2. Repeat customers.
3. Word of mouth referrals.
What Are You Doing To Provide Your Customers With Great Support?
Areas that should be important to any entrepreneur that has customers to take care of include:
- Answering queries promptly.
- Allowing people to opt-out of communications if they request it.
- Tracking your support issues so you can improve on your overall customer satisfaction.
Queries
Do you have an autoresponder tool that answers queries that come in? Even if you have a wait time for answering questions, an autoresponder can promptly tell your customers that you have their inquiry and that you will attend to it within a specified amount of time. People appreciate knowing what to expect.
A support ticket system can be a great way to manage this because your customers will also get a reference number so that they know their request is in queue and can be traced and in some cases they can even use a system on your website that lets them query the status of their request.
Opting Out
Autoresponder tools allow people to automatically opt-out of communications from you or cancel subscriptions from you. This can be important when you have a large list of customers because manually managing a customer list for e-mail or newsletter communications can result in too much room for error and oversight.
You can manage things manually but most customer list management tools are very inexpensive and very worthwhile as far as Online Customer Support goes.
Tracking
Tracking the types of questions, complaints, problems, and compliments you receive is also a great way to improve your customer satisfaction statistics.
Any company that wants to grow and increase customer loyalty should regularly work to improve their customer satisfaction and the internet definitely provides tools to help you do that. Statistics software can tell you a lot about your online customers.
Autoresponder software packages can help you manage communications effectively and track opt-ins, opt-outs, extract reporting data, and more. And a support ticket system can really help you automate the way you handle inquiries so it’s a great time saver too!
The less time you spend dealing with putting out ‘fires’ with customers, the more you can devote to nurturing happy customer relationships!
There are even live answering services or automated website assistants that you can use to help the customer feel like they have a helping hand to guide them through problems, issues, and concerns.
Investing in increased Online Customer Support is definitely a worthwhile investment in the profitability of your online business.
About Sean Rasmussen
Hi Sean,
Good customer service is the key to making sales whether your business is online or offline. The principles don’t change just the tools.
Using an auto-responder must save a lot of time! I haven’t actually used and auto responder before but I did see some advertising for free auto-responder software the other day, I wonder if it would be worth trying out some free auto-responder software as opposed to a paid version first?
I have never tried a free service Jeremy, I guess you could give it a try and see how it performs. If you do, monitor it closely as you really don’t want to make too many stuff ups with your emails
Word of mouth is still the most powerful form of advertising, and bad news travels fast. You are right Sean, when I have a complaint or problem I dont mind waiting for a response just as long as I know one is coming.
Hi Jody,
You’re right, word of mouth is the most powerful form of advertising. I trust my friends a lot more than I trust any advertising from the business itself.
Basically, if a friend says something is good; I’ll try it.
So true – both online and offline!
That shows how important great online customer support is for your online business as everybody can have a problem with a product once in a while, but it depends if the negative impression is left to stay or if it is taken care of with great customer service.
Great online customer support is definitely key to keep customers. Because there can be huge differences and it is mostly after the sale, so it demonstrates if the shop was only interested in one of money or is really interested in a long term repeat business.
Thanks for the tips, and I guess online an auto responder is an absolutely necessary tool to make sure each customer is acknowledged in the best and fastest possible way.
Too many companies are lacking when it comes to providing great online support. It’s the smart marketer who will utilise the available tools to keep clients happy.
I’ve never used an autoresponder on a website before so this is another area I’ll have to investigate. The ToDo list is getting longer with each excellent article I read.
Giving great customer support is A MUST – whether it’s online or offline. Repeat customers are called clients and it’s clients that do your best advertising for you through word of mouth.
Jum Rohn says “One well-taken-care-of customer can be worth more than $10,000 worth of advertising.”
Have you ever tried the customer support for Google or Yahoo? They are great examples of what not to do. Well, that even may be hard to assess and often you cannot find how to access direct support – you usually are fobbed off onto some FAQ type page and there is never an easily identifiable link that takes you straight to where you can email them.
A good example is on hostmonster and hostgator – both of these have live chats – which allows you to get answers immediately online. Sometimes you may have to wait until a person is available, but that is OK.
Obviously Google and Yahoo are too big to give a hoot about what Jim Rohn says