This is a guest post from Keith Barrett at Offer UK

If you sell your products and services online then you may feel somewhat distant from your customers. To some extent, that’s a natural by-product of the way in which online selling often works.

It’s not like having your own physical store, where you may see individual customers on a regular basis and will probably find it easier to strike up a good relationship with them.

Despite this, it is perfectly possible to provide your customers with what they want when you are selling online. As ever, the key to running a successful business is to ensure that you maintain a high level of customer service. This is the best way to guarantee that customers will keep returning to your online store.

When it comes to the internet, you need to think about how potential customers will react from the moment that they arrive at your website.

You should be aiming to create a site that is professional, that’s easy to navigate around and where everything is transparent.

In particular, you should obviously provide a secure payment facility and also make sure that you make it clear that you have done so. Ensure that you don’t hide any costs – be up front about how much it will cost for you to deliver items, for example. Customers like honesty – they don’t want to feel that you’re holding back any information.

If you have a great deal to offer then certainly make the most of it. Many people associate internet shopping with cost savings, so there’s no harm in demonstrating that they can save by shopping online at your store. Just make sure that you avoid making any false claims. Again, the key here is to be honest and transparent.

What about when it comes to customer contact? Some internet stores like to deal with all contact by email. Although this is certainly possible, you really need to think carefully about how you deal with such emails.

You should certainly always try to reply as quickly as you possibly can. Make sure that your replies are always professional and informative. You should try to avoid standard, automated responses. It can be absolutely infuriating to receive emails of this nature and you certainly don’t want to annoy your customers.

Keeping your customers happy is all about being professional, efficient, honest and transparent. If you stick to these basic principles then you won’t go far wrong.

Author’s Bio:
Keith Barrett takes a keen interest in consumer issues. He writes about shopping and discount codes for Offer UK, a leading consumer website.

If your company has a website (which it should), it would be run a little differently if Santa was in charge.

What do you think would happen if jolly old Saint Nick ran your website and was in charge of your e-commerce efforts?

Perfect Product Recommendations

Since Santa already knows what everyone likes, the website would prominently display what customers are interested in and are most likely to purchase.

This intense personalization of your site’s offerings will drive sales through the roof.

Lesson: What can you do to better adjust your website to the individual people that are using it? One size doesn’t fit all.

Free Overnight Shipping (only Dec 24th)

If Santa was in charge of your website, any order your customers placed on Christmas Eve would arrive the next morning. That may even be faster than Zappos can deliver.

(Of course, if they don’t order that day, they have to wait a year.)

Lesson: Quick delivery builds trust, a delay undermines the customer experience.

Biggest Product Selection

Sorry Amazon, but an online store run by Santa will have more products than can be counted. After all, he is known for meeting the needs of boys and girls with different tastes all over the world.

Lesson: Does your current online store offer enough products to reach the prospective customers that are crossing your path?

Learn from Santa and your e-commerce efforts will be significantly more successful in the coming year.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

Every person that comes across your website is different. They have different care-abouts, preferences, and buying behaviors.

Unfortunately, your website is either oblivious to these differences or may be trying to appeal to everyone at the same time. Both of these approaches can kill your online potential.

Think about how you like to shop online.

Perhaps you like to watch a video that shows a product demo. You may find that you are a more visual person, one that likes large images, videos, and graphics to help you make a purchase decision.

On the other hand, maybe you just want the facts and a long list of product descriptions suits your fancy.

Your customers likewise have differing tastes and preferences that ultimately impact how they trust you and if they will buy from you.

I recently read an article in the MIT Sloan Management Review titled “Morph the Web To Build Empathy, Trust and Sales” that highlighted some emerging technology and algorithms that lets your website learn from customer behavior and respond accordingly.

The article highlights how people can fall into different cognitive styles which indicate how they “perceive, think and solve problems.” People may lean towards being more visual or verbal and then more analytic or holistic when considering your product or service.

Why would adapting to customer behavior be important on your website?

Your website is your virtual sales person. A real-life sales person can adjust the tone, sales pitch, talking points, and invitations to match customer reactions.

The closer your website can intelligently respond to the individual customers, the more likely you will strike a cord with them and convert more visitors to customers.

Naturally, too much intelligence could be a little creepy to a customer. However, if you present choices, data, pictures, and descriptions a customer likes to see, it won’t seem creepy at all, but rather reassuring and natural to them.

Customers will be able to find what they are looking for, be confident in your product, and will buy from you all because you anticipated the style in which they wanted to receive that information.

This leads to customers having an emotional bond with your website and company, which is a very powerful relationship to have. Loyal, repeat customers aren’t mechanically returning to you, but want to do business with you again.

The coupon code box you have in the checkout process of your e-commerce store is a disruptive psychological trigger. Only customers with a coupon code in hand will sail easily through that part of your process. Everyone else is headed for trouble.

When customers don’t have a coupon code, it causes them to pause. “Why don’t I have a coupon code? Am I missing something? Who are these special customers that get coupons when I don’t?”

All these questions are raging in the heads of your customer and they create an unsettled state of mind. At this point your customers may do one of these things:

• proceed to checkout because they just don’t care about price
• proceed to checkout anyway, but just a little more displeased than before
• leave your site and go somewhere they know they can get a discount
• go search for coupon codes and return and use one they found via Google

Many of these outcomes mean you sell your product and get paid. But at what cost?

Some of these results mean you get paid less than you were originally going to get (and what the customer was even willing to pay) before you provided the confusion of a coupon code box.

The Get Elastic e-commerce blog also points out that when people search for coupon codes online, the resulting sites often sneak in an affiliate link so you not only lose the price of the coupon but you have to pay out a commission that wasn’t necessary.

To counter this, the Get Elastic folks recommend using custom URLs that don’t require people to enter coupon codes or that selectively show the coupon code box. The discount shows up when appropriate and doesn’t confuse people when not applicable.

In the world of e-commerce, customers expect instant and accurate updates of their order.

When there is a void of information, customers start to fear something may be wrong.

After a recent purchase from Costco’s website, I received a series of email updates on my order:

1. order was received
2. order was sent to fulfillment
3. order was shipped
4. order was delivered

The consistent status updates of my purchase never gave me pause or reason to worry.

When a customer orders from your website, do they immediately receive an email confirmation that the order was received? What happens after that?

When your email notifications aren’t in sync with the real world, customers are either left in the dark or wonder why they should trust your system again.

We ordered a replacement part for our dishwasher from the Sears website. The order went fine and the part arrived as ordered. However, a week later I got an email saying that my order had shipped. A week after I got it!

Trust is hard to gain and easy to lose. Keeping your customers in the loop on their order process helps set delivery expectations and bridge the shipping gap that exists in e-commerce orders.

When a customer calls you on the phone to ask a question or service their account, you’ll pay more operationally than if that same customer can self-service on your website.

How do you bridge the gap for those customers that reach for the phone first?

1. Tell your customer they can take care of this quickly and easily on your website next time.
2. Have your customer service representatives setup an online account while the customer is on the phone.

If you stop at the first step, you won’t see as many customers head to your website than if you follow through and complete both steps.

I recently called my gas utility company, Atmos Energy, because my bill had been lost in the mail. Not only did their customer service rep tell me my balance (my reason for calling) but he set up an account for me on the website, gave me my login and password, and I was ready to go.

I was able to immediately login to the website and set up recurring payments with a credit card to reduce future hassle.

Remember, when customers call they have a specific need. Solve that problem and then guide them right into the online connection.

Speak to convenience, time saved, and some of the other benefits of using your website over calling on the phone. With that foundation in place, setup an online account and your customers will be over most of the hurdles of their initial visit to your website.

My beautiful wife recently bought me a Nintendo Wii for my birthday. In an effort to try some new video games, I subscribed to GameFly, a web-based game rental service, that Beth mentioned in her comments about Netflix and setting delivery expectations.

As my first month drew to a close, I realized I was too busy to play games enough to justify the monthly cost. I went through GameFly’s online cancellation process and was presented with this form:

While this was an obstacle on my way to cancellation, I thought they handled it gracefully by following a few key principles:

1. They tell me why they are asking for this information. “Oh, it is to help other customers.”
2. The options are clear and easy to understand
3. If I didn’t find a reason, I could always just type in a comment

When asking these types of questions, try to keep your list of options short and concise. Customers should be able to quickly find the relevant option and move on.

From the business side, GameFly is able to collect some good information on how they could improve their service. Of course, not all customers will answer the questions but it is a good way to keep a pulse on why customers do what they do.

Does your website let customers pick options that you know aren’t available? To get the most out of your website, it should automate the validation of customers’ selections.

Validate Inputs

My wife and I have been trying for months to get reservations at a local restaurant, Fonda San Miguel. Their website offers an online reservation system. I tried to schedule a lunch reservation and the system told me it had been accepted without issue. I later received a phone call from the restaurant telling me that they aren’t open for lunch.

Why was I able to request a reservation for a time that they aren’t open? Their reservation form had an open text field for entering reservation times:

Leverage the automation possible with your website to set proper expectations with customers.

Prevent Selections

At work, my team maintains a suite of online product configuration tools called Advisors. Since our products are complicated, it is easier to prevent customers from making mistakes than try to explain afterward why a selection isn’t compatible. In our Advisors, we gray out incompatible selections so we don’t have to bark at you when they don’t work.

Don’t let customers make selections that you know are bad. As the old adage says, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Ask at the Right Time

I was recently looking for some office supplies on the Office Depot website. When I added the product to cart, the site asked me for my zip code. When I entered that number, the site claimed that the product wasn’t available. So why did it let me add to cart in the first place?

Customers expect online stores to be location agnostic. Even if my local store doesn’t have the product, you should be able to ship it to me from your big warehouse. This perception is especially true of larger national chains, like Office Depot.

If you have local stores or dependencies, ask for the zip code up front. Lowes.com does this to show you store availability.

You Can Be Perfect

You can build your website to prevent errors from happening. Only allow customers to pick products or selections that are valid choices. If prevention doesn’t work, use the automation to your advantage and alert customers immediately that something is amiss.

With the influx of web-based services and applications, customers don’t always have a brick and mortar option when it comes to customer service. Many web apps only offer customer service through email. How can these online companies still provide great customer experiences to customers?

As a follow up on my The Best Service is No Service book review, I asked the authors to share their thoughts on customer service for web-based applications.

One of the authors, David Jaffe, responded with his thoughts that I quote below.

Root Cause Analysis

We did some work a year ago with eBay and their Power sellers in Australia. There were many powerful lessons from the book for them:

a) Only some had analyzed and tried to fix the root causes of the emails they received from clients – Most had tried to put more and more information in the product descriptions and that made matters worse

Unless you identify the real reason customers are having trouble, you’re just guessing. Making assumptions based on your experience is fine, sometimes your educated first impression is correct. However, the sure way to verify your ideas is to test them. Let your customers be your real world testers and let them vote with their actions on which of your ideas is the best.

Customer Ignorance

b) Many were frustrated by customer ignorance – “Don’t they know that if they want to pay that way it will take X days?”

At this year’s SXSW Interactive, Henry Jenkins stated: “People aren’t idiots. They do things for a reason.” If customers are demonstrating behavior you feel is ignorant, find out why they are doing something. The fault may very well lie with your application, the design, copy writing, etc.

Easy to Contact

c) Many made themselves hard to contact – They had auctions closing on Sundays but no one answered emails on Sundays!

Web applications often force customers to contact the company via one channel: email. If such is the case with your web app, you need to answer emails. Be timely in responses and set expectations of your response window to customer emails.

Listen

d) None of them saw emails as a way to listen to customers – Emails were an annoyance even though it was their only direct contact with customers

Emails from customers may be the only way you hear from customers. If such is the case, listen and learn. Sure, you may get repetitive questions or feedback, but this can also be a goldmine for identifying issues and generating ideas. Turn your most frequently asked questions into online help or tweak your copy writing to better explain functionality.

Work with Customers

e) The clever ones had worked out that all issues could be solved – The bad ones got a hostile customer rating and fought back. The good sellers worked with the customer to have the rating changed.

Reach out and work with customers to resolve problems. Since many companies don’t even try with customers, the simple act of engaging customers in the discussion will put you ahead of many. Sure, not everyone will be happy, but those that you do help will be happier in the end.

Listen, Change, Test, Repeat

The key to customer service for your web application is an iterative cycle. Listen to customers. Identify the root causes of problems. Make changes to your application to correct issues. Test your changes and continue the cycle.

The web offers a great forum for rapid experimentation and response. Take advantage of the technological advantage you have over more traditional, offline services and create a stellar user experience for your customers.

Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com, presented his “Top 10 Lessons Learned in E-Commerce” at this year’s SXSW Interactive. Last year, Tony spoke on the Customer Service is the New Marketing panel. The principles they use at Zappos really opened my eyes to true customer service.

This year, Tony’s top 10 e-commerce list included:

1. E-Commerce business is built on repeat customers. Even though you are online, you can still foster long-term relationships.
2. Word of mouth really works online. Most of Zappos’ new customers come from offline word of mouth.
3. Don’t compete on price.
4. Make sure your web site inventory is 100% accurate. Customer expectations can be shattered if you don’t deliver what they saw available on your web site.
5. Centrally locate your distribution to speed shipping and delivery times.
6. Customer Service is an investment, not an expense. The relationships that you form via great service will pay for themselves in repeat business.
7. Start small & stay focused. Don’t try to get too big, too fast.
8. Don’t be secretive. Don’t worry about competitors.
9. Actively manage your company culture. Zappos has a culture book they give to employees and they immerse every new hire in the call center and distribution world for several weeks before they begin their “real” jobs.
10. Be wary of so-called experts. You know your company and your culture best. As Hamlet said, “To thine own self be true.”

You can view the slides from his presentation here:

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Rainy Day Example

While e-commerce is the vehicle through which Zappos.com makes their money, they are focused squarely on top quality customer service.

photo by sprigley

The fourth day of the SXSW conference was a rainy day, start to finish. As I left for lunch, I saw the Zappos CEO and crew dressed in rain ponchos and handing out free Zappos.com branded rain ponchos to everyone.

Customer service is such a part of their being that these guys not only exceed expectations in e-commerce but also wherever they go. I saw people in Zappos ponchos all day long. Brilliant timing and marketing!