Selling Online #10 : Customer Service

For this month’s column I’m going to write about customer service and how it applies to your e-commerce operations.

If one of your motivations for starting up an e-commerce operation is because you think that it will be an easy way to sell to customers without personal interaction, then you may need a reset on your expectations.

Just like in your physical dealership, customer service online is a tool to help set your store apart from all the other sites out there. Providing strong pre- and post- sale customer service goes a long way toward creating a level of customer loyalty that under most circumstances outweighs the costs involved with setting up and running the customer service aspect of your business.

While there are plenty of things you can learn from the big boys like Amazon when it comes to running a successful e-commerce operation, personal customer service (especially over the phone) is not one of them. Have you ever tried to dig up the phone number for customer service on Amazon?

For an awesome take on Amazon’s crap-tastic approach to customer service, read this.

Amazon can work this way because they are large enough that the lost business due to customers upset they can’t get a live person on the phone is far outweighed by the costs necessary to run a call center of the size that Amazon would need. Not to mention the challenge of having all of these people well-trained on the seemingly limitless supply of products that Amazon offers.

However, you are not Amazon. You do not have the constant stream of customers coming to you because of your name and your sheer size. The Amazon practice of burying your contact phone numbers is not a model you want to replicate. Trust me.

Make sure that your customer service phone number is out in front for your site’s visitors to see without hunting for it through a maze of menus. And once a customer makes a call, make sure that the person on your end is educated and empowered to actually deal with that customer’s issues. The empowerment is a big piece. An enraged customer calling to complain about an order is not going to be made any happier if they are repeatedly put on hold while the clerk on the phone has to “check with the manager.”

While a huge percentage of the inbound phone calls are bound to be people asking the same question, “Where’s my stuff”, those people are still valuable customers that are actively making the effort to talk to your store. Considering how much it costs in advertising to get a new, live, customer, make sure you are equipped to make the most out of every customer contact.

Make sure that the person answering the phone or email in your shop is equipped to look at the status of the order in question. That means giving them the tools and systems to look at the status of things like back-ordered products, supplier stock status, and of course the tracking status of orders that have already shipped. Make sure that the systems are accessible and accurate so that you can give the customer the correct answer quickly.

When it comes to customer service before the sale, if a customer calls in to ask a question about a product they are looking at on your site, make sure the person answering the phone is knowledgeable enough to not only answer that particular question, but can also recommend other products that may be necessary or useful to the customer. This is an excellent opportunity for cross-selling and up-selling. Properly staffed, you can set up your service operation to be self funded from the additional sales that it generates.

If you are getting the picture that you can’t just hire minimum wage trained monkeys to breathe into a phone and call it customer service, you’re beginning to see the light!

Use customer service as an opportunity to differentiate your dealership and your website. Be unlike the majority of fly-by-night e-commerce sites out there, and contradict your customer’s expectations by providing an exceptional customer service experience and you will have a customer that comes to your site whenever they need stuff for their ride.

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