Did you know that just by providing exceptional customer service and support you could actually triple - or quadruple your sales without spending a single extra cent? It’s easy when you know how.

Conventional customer support - when you have an offline business -would involve your customer either dropping by your office or calling you on the phone, or even having your representative dropping by their office. But with the emergence of e commerce, flourishing businesses have taken their services online successfully. Practically everyone has access to the Internet, and it makes sense to provide customer service as part of the online sales experience. This can be made effective in a number of ways - saving time, resources, improving customer satisfaction, minimizes spam and - brings in huge profits through sales - and repeat sales. Let us now look at how online customer support can be high quality:

Live Chat:

This is easily the best option for all online businesses. You can actually give your customers real-time help and deal with several customers at the same time when your customer support people are geared to handle it. Most websites indicate the timings during which customers can use chat so that they get in touch during that time. There are many businesses that offer around-the-clock support.

Live chat is like instant messaging and once you install it, all your customers need to do is click on a link and start chatting via a small browser window.

Order Tracking:

A lot of customers want to know the status of their orders. You probably receive them all the time. The process of order tracking can be automated, thereby saving you a lot of time to handle other priorities. If you have a shopping cart program you probably have an integrated order tracking facility. This will substantially reduce the amount of email you receive and have to respond to, from customers wanting to know about their order.

After the order is shipped, the tracking info is fed into the shopping cart application. Many shopping carts generate automated email messages to let the customer know their tracking info - telling them whether the order is pending, shipped or delivered. All this minimizes your effort, speeds up communication and brings in repeat orders from happy customers.

After sales support begins after your order is shipped. Sometimes you might have to handle product returns due to damages or deal with other issues. There’s something called the support ticket process that can greatly help in dealing with these issues. These are simple to implement. When customers visit your site, they click a link and submit order information. The program forwards this to you and you respond. It is ideal for a big customer base.

Telephone Support

Sometimes you might be able to sort something out far more quickly on the phone with an irate customer. Some people just prefer to pick up the phone and talk rather than go through technology.

See - it all boils down to showing that you care for your customer - whether it is offline or online. It keeps them coming back. It triples your sales by just keeping a good system for customer support.

Popularity: 79% [?]