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Ultimate Online Customer Service Experience

Can your website offer the ultimate online customer service experience? Of course it can! The tips offered below can help you build a state of the art online customer service website.

"Just the facts Ma’am." Many of us are old enough to remember this famous line from Dragnet. The original line was, "We just want the facts Ma’am’". This is exactly what most customers want. In the web world, FAQ or frequently asked questions can be a great source of information for customers. Customers can find answers to common questions and a well developed F.A.Q. section on your site can also reduce staff time.

Offer downloadable product or service guides. These guides should be compiled in industry standard .pdf or flash paper formats so the majority of visitors to your site can read them. Offering guides to products or services that work with your own can be very helpful as well.

A contact form and or helpdesk is a must. Customers can submit help tickets or email you or your staff for answers to questions regarding your product or service. A quick response will elevate your position in customer’s eyes.

A media center can offer several benefits. If you send out press releases or if someone from your company does interviews with radio, TV or print, a media center provides a place for news releases, copies of recent articles and corporate information. Your media center should also include relevant pictures, corporate information and a press kit if appropriate. A link to or information regarding company media personnel should be included.

A calendar of events keeps people informed. If you do several home shows or the like, a calendar of where and when the shows take place can help customers find you. Media appearances or interviews should also be listed here.

Newsletters can be a great source for customer contact. Offer a newsletter sign-up on your site. Be sure to have a system for confirming sign-ups so you don't appear to be sending spam. A newsletter archive is nice if it is appropriate considering the content of your newsletter.

Contact information is a must. Provide clear concise contact information on every page of your website. Customers don't want to dig to find out how to contact you.

Use how to articles, tutorials and e-learning to enhance the use of your products and services. We all love free information so take advantage of your web space and offer your customers what they want.

Follow these tips and customer service will be as easy as clicking a link to your website.

Ideas On Email

First I would like to address a couple of email myths. The two myths are addressed together since the cause of each is related.

The two myths are, email is fast and reliable. Email is actually not reliable and very often it isn't what most of us would consider fast.

Let's address reliability first. A study our office took part in a few years ago demonstrated that without specifically filtering emails with a friends or white list, email had only a 68% success rate. That means that 32% of unsolicited emails never arrived in the intended recipients inbox. Not exactly what I would call reliable. Add the friends or white list above and the rate climbed in to the high 80 percentile. Still not what I would call reliable.

What causes emails to fail to reach their destination? Many factors and sadly only a few that we have any control over. The obvious reasons are wrong address, recipient account closed or changed, no longer employed at the same business etc. These are errors we can correct. But what about the rest?

To understand what happens to some emails we must first understand how they travel and are delivered. Simply put, an electronic packet of information (or several) is sent over the internet. To reach the destination server an email may travel through several other servers to get there.

If an email has to travel through seven servers to reach its recipient it only takes a problem with one of those seven servers to dump or eliminate your email. Server administrators are very practical and very analytical people. Imagine if you are in charge of a server and it breaks down. Your best calculations show that it will take two days to get through the back log of information waiting to pass through your server. Most administrators will determine if that is acceptable and deal with the back log appropriately. What if your calculations show that it may take weeks to catch up? Most servers will be dumped or cleared to allow traffic to continue at a normal pace. There goes your email!

There is no way to notify you, No way to recapture the electronic packet, it is just gone. There is nothing you or your recipient can do about it. And it is probably no one persons fault. Servers go down for all kinds of reasons, mechanical failure, weather, power outages and surges etc.

The same thing is true regarding the speed of an email. We are accustomed to them arriving almost instantaneously, but many get held up for hours or even days. When this newsletter is sent it is not unusual for us to receive an alert stating that one or more emails has not been delivered, there is nothing we need to do and delivery will be retried in 4 hours. In almost every case that is the last we hear about it, but in rare instances we will receive an email stating that after repeated attempts the email can not be delivered. This is received anywhere from 24 -48 hours after the newsletter was sent. Oddly enough, when we resend the email it often gets right through to the intended recipient.

What can we do about this? First, if what you are sending is business crucial email, request a delivery receipt. All major email programs allow for a delivery receipt request to be set up for specific emails. Don't over do it though, delivery receipts are considered bad form if the content isn't crucial. Second, if you get no response to an email assume the recipient did not get it. This may not always be the case but it is the safe choice. You should have a copy of the original email in your sent box. Third, if you are talking to someone on the phone and they say, "I will email that to you right away." Confirm the time span in which you should expect to receive the email so you can re-contact the sender if an email hasn't arrived. If a person is very busy "right away" may mean tomorrow.

Auto responders can be a great tool to let people know that you intend to respond to every email within a specified period and that if they don't receive a response, they should let you know. Maybe your response got lost in the transfer? This is much better than some one thinking you just don't respond. I know we are counting on at least one of these two emails getting through but the odds are better than if it is just one.

One other way to avoid problems is to limit consecutive emails to individuals. If we think ahead and send one email instead of using email like a chat program we can reduce by sheer probability the number of lost or affected emails. If we need to carry on a conversation with someone use the phone or any number of free online messenger programs. Imagine how the conversation would be affected if all but one email arrives in a timely fashion but that one is delayed for several hours.

Keep these few tips in mind when using email and many of the associated problems can be avoided.