|
|
|
8 Key Factors that are essential for a Solid Internet Business
There are a number of ingredients that go into making and growing a successful internet business, but the most important is action. As an entrepreneur you will understand that time is against you and that with each passing day your competitors are...
Choosing a Merchant Account Provider
When looking for a merchant account provider, it is important to do a lot of research. You do not want to pay too much or sign up with a disreputable company. However, you do need to keep in mind that once you do sign up it could take up to a week...
E-marketplaces from Seller's Perspective
What is an E-marketplace anyway? E-marketplace is a business to business web based venue, where buyers and sellers meet online, generate business leads and conduct business transactions. The e-marketplace features are tailored in a manner so that a...
Making Your OWN Business From Affiliate Programs
WHY MAKE IT YOUR OWN BUSINESS? No matter how you look at it, if you're someone else's affiliate, you are, for the most part, helping them build their business and not your own. Unless, that is, you take other's affiliate programs and re-sell ...
Most Commonly Asked Questions About Ezine Publishing
Most Commonly Asked Questions About Ezine Publishing © Terri Seymour Getting so many emails as I do about ezine publishing, I thought maybe an article covering the most asked questions would be useful to some of you who are thinking about or...
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Customer Service - The Key to Increased Customer Lifetime Value
Last month we discussed building credibility and trust at your website, so that visitors feel comfortable buying from you. That is half of the battle. The more important part is increasing the lifetime value of each customer, that is, getting your one-time buyers to be repeat customers. There are many factors that go into this: marketing; product quality; and the consumable nature of the product or service you sell. However, if you have poor (or non-existent) customer service, you can forget about repeat business.
Since none of us is running a large company (I assume) and don’t have much of a budget—if any—for customer service, all of the tips and resources in this article are either free or low-cost. Customer service for small businesses is typically provided via sweat equity.
Ground Rules
First, some common sense ground rules for providing good customer service:
1.The more ways you have to contact you the more assured the potential and repeat buyer will feel in coming back to your site. We will look at many of these ways in this article.
2.Respond quickly! There is no point to having many methods of contacting you (e.g., email, chat, voice mail) and then fail to respond in a timely manner. It will just turn people off. Better to have less contact methods and be diligent in responding to issues or requests.
3.Be proactive. Since we want to minimize the amount of time spent with customer service (and so do our customers!), provide as many ways as possible to answer common questions and problems as possible. Obvious solutions to this are FAQs and email updates.
4.Ask customers how you’re doing. Get feedback about your customer service from those who use it. Are the FAQs comprehensive? How hard was it to get in touch? Did you get your problem solved? This will enable you to improve your service. You may have to offer a freebie to get people to respond. There are many free sites that provide surveys and polls for your website, including: http://www.pollwizard.com; http://www.visitorpoll.com; http://www.pollit.com; http://polls.whatiz.com
Now that we have that out of the way, let’s discuss the common low-cost methods of customer service that we can use.
EMAIL
Yes, this is an obvious one, and is a minimum requirement for every website. You should have a specific email address for support requests (typically support@yourdomain.com). I have all email to this address forwarded to my MS Outlook mailbox and I use filters to color it red. This way I can take a quick glance and see if anyone is requesting help.
FAX
Some people like to use FAX, especially if they don’t want to send messages from their work email. You don’t need to own a FAX machine; you can get free FAX receive service that goes straight to your email. The two popular services are http://www.efax.com, and http://j2.com. You will have to pay if you want to send faxes.
USER FORUM
In the old days it was called a bulletin board system (BBS), now they are user forums or groups. This is a great way to provide support, mostly because if you can get enough people to use it, your customers will help each other out! People will request answers to problems that others may have already had, and they can respond with the answer. However—you must make an effort to participate in the group and answer questions
as much as possible, at least once a day. You can also post updates and message digests to common problems in the user group as well. The best place to start a group is at http://groups.yahoo.com.
CHAT
Chat is very popular on the Internet, and is becoming a popular tool with customer service as well. The chat software is free and includes products from AOL, MSN, and Yahoo, as well as mIRC and ICQ. Personally, I feel that ICQ is the best product to use for a business site. You can get it at http://icq.com. The only drawback to chat software is that they are proprietary and can only work with users that have the same software. So if some of your customers use MSN Chat, and some use AOL Instant Messaging, then you need to have both on your computer. There are a few chat programs that are capable of working with multiple chat services including the ones I listed above. These programs are: Jabber at http://www.jabber.com/index.shtml, EWZY at http://www.cactusvisionsoftware.com/ewzy.htm (which includes an autoresponder), and my personal favorite Trillian at http://www.cactusvisionsoftware.com/ewzy.htm.
There are more sophisticated software and services that you can use if you have larger needs for customer service. These include advanced chat with transcriptions, video, voice chat, etc. Take a look at the following sites: http://www.humanclick.com, http://www.phplivesupport.com/, or go to http://www.ecommercetimes.com/product_guide/live_interaction/ to see a current list of live interaction services and software.
VOICE and PHONE
Another method that really gives customers a “warm fuzzy” is being able to contact you by voice, such as a voice mailbox or live phone call. You can typically rent a voice mailbox from AT&T or other provider at a low-cost. Just make sure you return people’s calls! A great way to talk to customers for free (or low-cost) is to use a Voice-Over-IP software product such as Net2Phone (see http://web.net2phone.com ). This provides you a way to call anywhere in the country for 2 cents a minute, and great overseas rates as well. I use it for personal calls a lot. The great thing is that if others have this software, you can talk from computer-to-computer for free. So put the download link to the software on your web site.
OTHER SERVICES
If you want it all in one spot, look into ureach.com (http://www.ureach.com). They have
A unified messaging service that includes call forwarding, voice mail, fax, email, file storage (30MB), PDA address book synchronization, pager notification, ICQ integration, all in a single interface. You can also access messages via your WAP mobile phone. Some of their features are free others are not. Their plan info can be found here:
http://www.ureach.com/help/planinfo.htm.
Finally, you should track your problems (outstanding and closed) for historical purposes. Most of us are able to do this using either MS-Word or Excel. If you need a more sophisticated trouble tracking software, the only one I found that looked decent and didn’t cost a mortgage was Request Commander (about $30) at http://www.nestersoft.com/requestcommander.
Good luck!
About the Author
Mike Martone is the webmaster at http://www.profitmonkey.com, editor of the free newsletter Ebiz Edge, and author of the ebook '7 Days to 700% More Traffic'
|
|
|
|
|
| Yahoo! Domains: Secure Domain Name Registration |
| This is a useful feature if you own multiple domain names. Complete Domain (DNS) Control. Advanced users: You can easily edit your name servers and MX, A, ... |
| smallbusiness.yahoo.com |
|
| Register domain names, domain name registration and domain name ... |
| Trust Register.com for domain names, domain name registration, domain name transfers, web hosting, easy-to-build Web sites, personalized email, reliable web ... |
| www.register.com |
|
| Web Hosting, web site design and domains from Network Solutions |
| Web Hosting, web site design, domain names and SSL certificates from Network ... Domain Names | Web Hosting | Web Design | SSL Certificates | Sell Online ... |
| www.networksolutions.com |
|
| WHOIS Search provides domain registration information from Network ... |
| Network Solutions WHOIS searches across multiple registrar databases to give you registration information on millions of domain names with many different ... |
| www.networksolutions.com |
|
| 123 Domain Names UK. Expert UK Domain Name Registration |
| Search and register UK domain names securely online. Low prices on all UK domain names with free support and advice. |
| www.123domainnames.co.uk |
|
| Domain name - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia |
| Letters are ASCII A–Z and a–z; domain names are compared case-insensitively. ... Fully qualified domain names (FQDNs) are sometimes written with a final dot ... |
| en.wikipedia.org |
|
| Internet Domain Name Registration, Domain Transfers. Your domain ... |
| GoDaddy.com: Pay less for domain names. Register your .com, .net and .org domains. Bulk pricing and private domain name registration options. |
| www.godaddy.com |
|
| Search, reserve, register domain names from checkdomain.com |
| Search, look up, check, reserve, purchase, register, back-order domain names, internet / Web addresses, URLs for any country in the world from ... |
| www.checkdomain.com |
|
| Nominet UK |
| Official registry for .uk domain names. |
| www.nominet.org.uk |
|
| Domain Names, Web Hosting, Web Design, Search Engine Optimisation ... |
| Melbourne IT is a world leader for domain name registration, offering search engine optimisation, web hosting, email plans, and website design. |
| www.melbourneit.com.au |
|
| Australia Domain Name Registration Services | .com.au Domains |
| Australian Domain Names | Aust Domains, Domain Name Registration and Website Hosting Australia. Aust Domains is an Australian favorite domain name registrar ... |
| www.austdomains.com.au |
|
| Buy Domain Names UK Web Hosting Dedicated Servers Broadband |
| UK based specialists in domain name registration, web hosting, dedicated servers and web design. All domain names come with free web and email forwarding. |
| www.lowcostnames.co.uk |
|
| Domain Name Registration || NetRegistry || .com.au $44.95 ... |
| Great value domain names with domain certificate, 24/7 domain name and service management through Control Panel, plus $1000s savings on leading Australian ... |
| www.domain.netregistry.com.au |
|
| Easily.co.uk - Search domain names, domain name registration ... |
| All US and UK domain names registered. Realtime name checker with full WHOIS. |
| easily.co.uk |
|
| Trademark Registration of Internet Domain Names |
| Home · Index · Search · System Alerts · Business Center · News and Notices · Contact Us. Trademark Registration of Internet Domain Names ... |
| www.uspto.gov |
|
| Netfirms - Web Hosting, Domain Names and E-commerce for Small Business |
| Netfirms provides free Web hosting, domain names, web page design tools and email for small business. |
| www.netfirms.com |
|
| Domain name registration from 123-reg |
| Register family, company & project domain names now, before someone else does! ... 123-reg dedicated servers, high performance hosting for your domain names ... |
| www.123-reg.co.uk |
|
| InterNIC | FAQs on the Domain Names, Registrars, and Registration |
| Information about who is responsible for domain names is publicly available to ... The rules and policies for registering domain names in the ccTLDs vary ... |
| www.internic.net |
|
| What is domain name? - A Word Definition From the Webopedia ... |
| Home page for Network Solutions, currently acting as the exclusive registrar of Internet domain names within the .com, .net, .edu and .org top-level domains ... |
| www.webopedia.com |
|
| Domain Name Registration, Domain Names, Web Hosting from Aplus.Net |
| domain name registration, domain names, domain register, register domain name, web site design, email services, domain name transfer, domains, email address ... |
| domains.aplus.net |
|
|