e-Business Tips & Ideas

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How can you provide the best online service possible? Just follow the leaders: 

• Anticipate questions. 
• Stay in touch.
• Respond quickly. The Web is an instant medium--except when it comes to getting responses from many businesses that seem to route incoming e-mail into a folder labeled "Ignore Forever." What's right for you? With a smaller staff (and probably no staff during night hours), you might find a 24-hour standard to be enough of a challenge. But monitor customers. If they demand a faster response, somehow you have to find a way to meet their needs.
• Hold their hands. Online, not every customer knows how to shop, and you have to be ready to help them buy. Understand that and be ready to help. Be patient, too. 
• Use cut and paste. Canned responses - cut-and-paste scripts - are used by all the leading sites, which track questions, hunt for the most asked, and produce templates for their representatives. You can do likewise. As you answer customer questions, file away your responses. Odds are, you'll be asked the same question within the week, and it's a great labor saver to have an answer ready.
• Stay sensitive. A worry with e-mail: It's easy to seem cold and unresponsive in the formality of the written word. Read and re-read your responses before they go out. You want to be - and appear - interested in the customer's issues and eager to find solutions.
• Offer choices. You cannot force the customer to contact you your way. Offer a choice, e-mail or the phone.

These steps will get you started delivering better customer service, but they're not enough. The only way to do online service right is to have the right attitude. For us, that attitude isn't that the customer is right. That doesn't go far enough. We believe the customer is king, and every customer service rep knows it. Have that attitude, and service gets easy to provide. It's that simple.