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.

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The only way to survive and flourish in business is to provide outstanding customer support. This brings us to the leading question - are your customers satisfied? By the end of this article, you should be able to confidently say - Yes.

Customer dissatisfaction usually arises from a host of simple things - failure to reply to an email promptly, availability of insufficient information about your products resulting in losing the customer to the competition, being left hanging on the phone to boring music when you called that toll free number - all these create annoyance, and leads to unhappy prospects and customers. And when this becomes a habit, the business simply ceases to exist. End of story.

But that’s not what I’m here for. I’m here to see how you can stay ahead of your competition by taking care of all those multiple things that help you commit to customer service. There are some rules that are worthwhile to print and keep:

• The first step is getting everyone in your organization together and collectively committing yourself to doing everything possible to ensure customer satisfaction. Customer service is not the sole domain of the marketing or customer service department. It involves every single person in the company.
• Make sure that everyone is familiar with your product range and company return policies. Brainstorm about the kind of questions you can expect and prepare a ‘frequently answered questions’ document that is accessible to everyone and save time. Preferably upload this on your website.
• Get to know your customers. Communicate with them regularly to know their buying habits and their specific needs. Pay attention to their complaints. Learn about their experience with your business. Did you know that good experiences could be turned into customer testimonials, which in turn can do a great job of endorsing your business? This means free advertising and more sales.
• Remember to treat a customer with respect at all times, regardless of whether you interact with them via email, phone, snail mail or meet them face to face. Everyone likes to be treated with courtesy. Thank them for orders placed, and show them you care. Phrases like “thank you for your patience” ” sorry to have kept you waiting’ ‘ we really appreciate your feedback’ makes a customer feel great about dealing with you.
• Arguing with a customer is a no-no. The customer is always right. Empathize. Do not take it personally. Focus on finding the solution to the issue. 80% of your customers will become loyal customers and give you repeat business when you solve the complaint in their favor.
• Prompt responses are the foundation of great customer service. So if you keep your customers hanging - they are not going to love you. Find ways to resolve complaints promptly and keep in touch with your customers - show a sense of urgency in your willingness to resolve the problem. This is another surefire way to get repeat business.
• Only promise what you can deliver. In fact, most gurus will tell you to under-promise and over-deliver. When expectations are exceeded, everyone is happy and you enjoy the fruits of this through sales. Over promising and under delivering on the other hand will make you lose your credibility and customers will lose trust.

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What’s the one thing that can make or break your business? You probably have every ingredient in place to make your business a roaring success - you have the product, your website is up and your marketing strategies are in place. But are you equipped to deal with your customers? You see - it is not enough to generate hordes of traffic to buy your products. It goes far beyond that.

Every business aims at repeat sales. This means you want your customer to come back often. Now, what is it that will tempt them to return to you for more of what you have to offer? Great customer service. When you have a strong customer support system, it leads to customer loyalty. Not only will these happy customers keep buying from you, but also recommend you to others because they have a positive experience with you and want to share it with everyone they know. Does that sound good to you?

We cannot over-emphasize how vital it is for your business to have an efficient and effective customer service system in place. Just some of the benefits you can expect through keeping our customers happy are:

• Save time
• Increase sales
• Increase profits
• Better exposure
• Brand building for your business
• Happy customers

When your customers have quick access to support from you, they feel more confident about buying from you. We’ve all experienced lousy service at some point or other in our lives - can you remember how you felt? Interestingly, we all tend to have a long memory when it comes to bad experiences and we probably thought to warn our friends by telling them about it.

Thus, to keep your business going great, you have absolutely no option but to provide world-class customer service - all the time. Think about this - for every satisfied customer, you’ll have created an advertisement for your business, and a very powerful one. As a first step, look at the following questions and see if you can answer with an enthusiastic ‘Yes’

• Are you easy to find?
• Are you easy to contact?
• Can you customer understand exactly what you deal with or sell?
• Is it easy to select your product?
• Do you have a simple to use payment system?
• Do you have an easy product return policy?
• Is it easy to get prompt answers to queries from you?

If you put yourself in your customer’s shoes, you’ll probably come with a lot more questions to deal with. It is easy to turn any ‘no’s that you may have answered to the above questions. And here are some tips that will help you improve your customer satisfaction program:

• Have a customer feedback system to show you care
• Provide a lifetime refund guarantee where feasible
• Be easy to contact - in fact, put your email address and phone numbers on each web page of your website. You’ll be surprised at how many people actually pick up the phone and call.
• Ensure that you have an FAQ page - answers to frequently asked questions. This is a quick way to minimize queries

Exceptional customer service is the one thing that can make or break your business - and you can easily ensure that you have a great support system in place.

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