Think Your Customer Support Doesn’t Matter?

Do you think that because you are selling something on a mini-site that your customer support doesn’t matter? If you do, you really need to correct that misunderstanding right now. I guarantee you that your customer support and desire to answer their inquiries will directly affect whether or not they buy from you again, and I’ll give you a recent offline example.

In the past few months, I spent a couple of thousand dollars with a company I won’t name, believing they could help me. In truth, it all started out quite well. Then, they sent me a false notice that they couldn’t continue with their service because I hadn’t done something I had, and it all started going downhill. Not good when it costs a customer thousands of dollars for you to perform that service.

Now granted, your product or subscription site probably isn’t going to cost someone thousands of dollars, unless you sell training programs. However, if you’re apathetic to customer emails, or your computer does something screwy and starts throwing out false panic attacks like the one I received from the company above, chances are you’re going to create negative publicity. That means you can forget things like referral sales or testimonials. In short, your customer service, however simple it may be, makes a difference.

Here are just a few tips on customer service:

• If you get an email or other communication from a customer, answer it.
• If you have a lot of different services/sales sites/subscription sites, set up a central ticket site (http://www.askjonleger.com is a good example of this), then point all the support links on all of your sites at that one site. Customers can fill out and track tickets, and you only have to go one place to support them.
• Support your customers after they purchase from you.
• Find out what your customers think after they sign up, buy, or leave. This will help improve your service and keep future customers happier.

It only take a little bit of bad to annoy a customer, and you’ve probably experienced it for yourself as a customer facing bad service. So don’t deliver it in your online business.