Customer Servces
How to Lose Customers for Life Using the Internetby Bill Ringle
Maria had used the Internet and found the perfect clock radio to purchase for her father as a Christmas gift. She had gone to the first web site that came to mind -- Circuit City's. She went to order the item, but the site didn't have a shopping cart mechanism. That didn't slow her down, since the company did list a telephone number on its contact page. The number wasn't toll-free, but the clock radio had exactly the feature set that would make it a great gift so it would be worth the extra cost. However, when the person who answered the phone turned out to be an outsourced information desk employee and not have any knowledge of how to connect my friend to a sales person, that was the last straw. Maria got back online, found the exact same clock radio through a different web site (J&R Electronics), and was able to simply and easily place her order online.
Lessons:
The Internet provides consumer choices like never before.
Customers will choose the path of least resistance. Maria solved her problem, even with the detour of going to a different vendor, in a fraction of the time it would have taken to drive to a shopping mall.
If your web site provides product information but cannot support sales transactions, then someone in your organization has spent a lot of money on a powerful anti-customer service mechanism: it works every minute of the day and has the potential to offend thousands of potential buyers an hour.
Customer service is one of the most important differentiators as you look to grow your online presence. Ignore it at your own peril.
Customers have the same need for financial products and services, but the ways in which they prefer to get their information is changing rapidly. Recreational Equipment, Inc. found that 30% of its online sales took place between 10pm and 7am, when none of its brick and mortar stores was open. Perhaps a sizable portion of your customer base is also looking to satisfy its needs outside of normal business hours. Are you providing an outlet for this need? To what degree are you supporting them and to what degree are you abandoning them to your competitors?
Keep in mind these key principles when evaluating your level customer service via the Net: convenience, completeness, and community.
With respect to convenience, how easy is it for a customer to do business with your organization via the Internet? Hint: think of it from their perspective, not yours.
Completeness refers to the scope of the process and functions your company makes available on the Internet. What parts of the process does it make sense to support? Pre-sales information to online sales to post-sales support covers the range, but not every target audience responds the same way in each situation. Have you asked your customers lately?
A community, whether it meets in a coffee house or chat room, is more than a database of names. It's about recognizing and delivering value to a particular group, and building upon common elements.
E-mail is the overlooked cousin of the web. Many companies will begin to become aware of its actual potential in the next several months as success stories emerge from this less sexy, but harder working tool. The best results take place when e-mail is used in tandem with web sites, where each technology compliments the business communications purpose of the other.
In preparation for helping your organization make the most of e-mail, here are the most common pitfalls to avoid.
E-mail
1. No chance of contact
If your organization doesn't have, use, or publicize their availability via e-m,ail, you're not even in the game.
2. No contact
Worse than not showing up is being a dabbler organization. Here, you announce avenues of contact, but fail to put the necessary resources behind it so that somebody actually reads and answers the e-mail sent by prospects and customers.
3. Poor quality contact
Did I mention that the staff assigned to this new task needs to be trained and educated about the company standards, bounds of authority, cultural expectations, and other measures of success in this new position? A good start is to have both management and line staff read, The Elements of E-mail Style.
4. Wrong kind of contact
In our business seminars, we show knowledge workers the difference between mail that gets read vs. mail that cries out for mercy deletion. Keep the ratio of value to promotion above 5:1 and you'll be in good shape.
5. Too much contact
Once you have someone's e-mail address, be sure to use it and not to abuse it. Savvy net customers have tricky ways of identifying companies that improperly sell their address to other advertisers (also known as "spammers"). The ones who work in marketing are the first ones who think up these schemes! Also, even if you do use the e-mail as a legitimate communications tool with your customers, avoid deluging them with notices announcements, surveys, and special offers. You'll slowly poison the well without knowing it.
Web sites
1. Not allowing orders or alternate means of contact.
It should be common sense to make sure that your web site supports the full business transaction for the customer. However, I'm amazed on a daily basis how seldom companies of all sizes neglect this simple idea.
2. Not acknowledging or responding to customer feedback.
Before offering a means to communicate via a web form or e-mail link to your customer service department, ask: What will we do with this information? Are there systems in place? Given our current staff capacity and capabilities, how many messages can we answer daily? How can we test the waters before hiring more people? How will we measure the return on our investment?
3. Confusing navigation.
Sometimes I joke with webmasters and ask them why they hide the good stuff where no one can find it. Einstein didn't have web sites in mind when he said "things should be as simple as possible, but not simpler," but the wisdom still applies.
4. Slow loading pages.
By now web developers are familiar with the concept of a web page budget, and know that there are penalties for exceeding the size of the collective components of a page. When you do the math, you know to keep the size of the text, graphics, and other media files to under 50k if you want the page to load in less than 30 seconds on a 33.6 modem. There are times to allow larger budgets, but not on the opening page and not without giving the user a choice in the matter.
5. Errors with new technologies (JavaScript, Visual Basic).
Remember to let business objectives and customer needs drive web development projects, not the latest whiz bang technology. If your web developers must experiment, have them do so on internal pages, not your public, external pages. I could award full tuition college scholarships to my local high school seniors each Spring if I had a dollar for every time I came across a page that said that VB active scripts will not behave as expected, and would you like to continue running scripts on the affected page!
Customer service practices need to be adapted and rigorously supported when your customers interact with your organization via the Internet.
Of course in practice, it takes both the technical mechanism, or channel, of communication, as well as the people behind it to make it successful.
A company needs to take an integrated approach to using Internet technologies, both internally and externally, so that it supports your business objectives of increasing sales, expanding market awareness, decreasing printing and other operational costs, and creating more satisfied customers.
When you realize that it takes many times more effort to qualify and establish a relationship with a new customer than to maintain a current one, the importance of these practices becomes readily apparent. What's more, it takes a lot less effort to use these tips as a quick assessment of your web site communications plan than to find out after the fact what drove customers away.
As a final thought, take one clock radio that's still sitting in the warehouse instead of on a nightstand and multiply by several thousand lost sales per day since the third week of December. Pour a fresh cup of coffee and meet with your team to review your company's web site.
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Bill Ringle. All right reserved. For information contact Frog Pond at 800.704.FROG(3764) or email susie@frogpond.com.
Business & Financial