Word of Mouse matters

Customer Service Online - are you doing it?

When someone visits your shop, you will often make an attempt to engage with them, develop a relationship, find out who they are, encourage them to come back by telling them there is a sale on next month, acquiring their contact details - perhaps by signing up to a mail order catalogue, or finding out what they are looking for, and offering to find them that item.

Those shops which do not do this are reliant on non-personal relationships, huge marketing budgets, and cut-priced items to beat the competition. But in this world where personal relationships in commerce matter....
it is the shops who say, "£20.05. Oh, make it £20, we won't go bust over 5p" who actually manage customer retention successfully. It is the shops who have staff who ask, "Can I help you find what you need?" in a non-demanding or non-aggressive style who discover that they can provide exactly the service that customer is looking for, and potentially you have a customer for 'life', as well as some great PR. It is the shops who say, "You live down Acacia Avenue, don't you? Did you know we deliver free of charge there every day/Thursday/once a month? Would you like us to bring your magazines/meat/veg/parcels
etc on our rounds?"

These type of activities are what build a customer list of happy, satisfied customers who tell others. Offline, we call it word of mouth recommendations and online, it is called 'word of mouse'. It is important to understand it.

Now, look at your website. Do you provide the same standard of customer care there as you expect on your sales floor? Do you have any mechanism for approaching the visitors to your website live? Or letting them contact you easily? Or keeping in touch with them, long after they have left your store? Or do they visit, look around, and leave without you being any the wiser who they are and what they want than an anonymous IP address in your traffic stats?

Let's use Lulu.com as a first example of how to get it right. Lulu.com offers LiveHelp. You click, ask your question, and a real person responds in real time. You don't need to pick up the phone, visit the store, or make a great effort. Your question is answered promptly, and quite often, there is a follow up email which provides extra info. All of this adds in to the user experience. I, for one, am now one of a growing virtual sales force who promote Lulu at every opportunity, because they go one step beyond the necessary to deal with potential customers. It is far harder to contact Amazon than Lulu, and get a personal response.

Imagine going on to the BT site and finding that there is someone there, live, who is able to deal with your query, or find the answer, instead of spending an hour or more on hold to someone in India, and still not getting the answer? (This happened to me today and it wasn't the first time. I speak from a growing level of frustration with corporate customer service from consumers!)

When I come to your website, how do you deal with my enquiry? Do you have a customer enquiry form that gets sent to some unknown bod in an untitled department at some unknown email address? When will I get a reply? "We will respond to your request shortly" means nothing to a customer angling to find the right product and buy it today. If you do not offer an 'instant response' system, then you have probably just lost a customer. And they are unlikely to respond in future if they felt let down during their visit to your website, so having their email address may just make things worse in future.

Do you offer an FAQ? A freephone number? Teach them how to use Skype so they can make the call for free? Do you have video manuals for your products or for your website that help them through questions asked over and over again? (And if questions are being asked frequently, why haven't you addressed that issue with the documentation that comes with the products or on your product listings????)

If you offer free resources, such as white papers, do you ask for an email address, so you can send them further info in future? Or do you, as I found recently on a land sale agents' site, just let people download the land and auction details, without adding them to a list of people who might be interested in other similar land sales that might happen in future? In that case, it was worse than it seemed at the outset, because there was no correlation between telephone enquiries, downloads, and those who turned up at the auction. The land agent had no way of offering further land details to anyone at all except those who had telephoned in requesting the details to be sent. They could have been building a huge database of those interested in land, and bringing together sellers and buyers constantly. This would set them apart from other land agents, for starters.

If someone has found your site, spent time looking at your products, don't just let them leave without either:

1) harvesting their email address for future contact eg a newsletter with offers and competitions and upgrades.
2) persuading them to sign up for an rss feed (more anonymous and less intrusive than email). It is their choice if they access and read it but at least you know they may be reading info on your products
3) contacting them whilst on site. There are products that allow you to contact those surfing your site and ask directly, "Can I help?" This pops up in an unobtrusive window in their browser, which they can choose to ignore if they wish. However, many people often find that websites are difficult to navigate, they can't find what they are looking for, and that a little personal assistance is appreciated.
4) offering a free sample or white paper that they can receive in return for their email address and permission to market to them in future. This doesn't have to be onerous on the customer and many people seek out free samples and can be your best sales force when they post to many other sites saying, "I got this and it's fab." This has the benefit of increasing the number of links to your site and thereby your search engine rankings, as well as getting the word out to others who may be interested in your product range.

You can follow up this type of person with a number of autoresponses, sent out for free, which encourage them to promote you further. This is really worthwhile if you also run an affiliate scheme, whereby they earn commission for every sale that comes from a recommendation by them.

On that note, it is worth realising that a virtual sales force, who have been provided with the necessary marketing materials so they are on message for your product(s), is invaluable. If the commission is commensurate with the amount of work they need to do to see a return, then you will find that affiliates (and especially super-affiliates) are worth their weight in gold. A small company can double or treble its sales force for very little expenditure and reap dividends.

So, to sum up. When ANY visitor comes to your website who is interested in your products, you should be looking to acquire contact details from them. (Ditto for your shop, store, exhibition stand etc in the 'real world'.)
Treat people courteously and with respect. Even if all you do is refer them to a 'competitor' who does stock the product they are looking for, they are likely to remember you positively, and recommend you,even if they didn't buy from you.
Market to those who you know. Existing customers are cheaper to maintain than acquiring new ones. But don't miss an opportunity to acquire new ones and look after them!
Think out of the box.