E-Commerce: Selling Online Tutorials
Basics / Customer Service
Subtitles of the Movie (E-Commerce: Selling Online / Basics / Customer Service)
In this lesson, let's talk about Customer Service. The most important element of selling either one item or millions is customer service. Excellent customer service brings you repeat customers and it brings you word of mouth sales. Customers who are pleased are going to tell their friends, they're going to post it on Facebook and they're going to Tweet it. Good customer service starts with an excellent site or store with great product information. Zappos is a store that is well known for their awesome customer service. They have lots of products with a lot of information. So again, if you're going to sell one item, even just on eBay, or maybe you have millions or thousands of products to sell like Zappos, those products that you're selling have to be easy to understand. The site has to be laid out well, and it has to be very, very easy for people to ask you questions. So here are the elements of good customer service. Twenty-four seven customer service. Zappos has it right there. If you're going to offer 24-7 service, you can offer it by providing e-mail, a ticket system, a 1-800 number or live chat. If you're just going to do small sales or maybe you're just doing this E-commerce on the side to earn some extra money, as long as you respond within 24 hours its fine. But do know the stores who respond the quickest to a question typically get the sale. Because a customer may have gone to three sites and asked the same question about the product and the first person who responds typically they'll buy that product from them. Now consider that when you respond to people, those responses need to be accurate and very polite. Sometimes stores or companies get into fast response. They don't even read the full e-mail that has the questions and it's so irritating. We've all been there. You send a question, they send you this pre-formatted response that had nothing to do with your question. So make sure you ensure quality over speed. An easy way to have customer service is to implement a ticket system. Makes it so much easier to track. I have one of those. There's free ticket systems out there if you're not wanting to invest a lot yet in something like that. There's a product called Hesk, H-e-s-k. There's also a product called eTicket, which is open source. Those are two products I've used for ticket systems. And you could just go out there and do a quick search for ticket systems and you'll find so many available. Now you could out source your 24-7 support, but be very careful. Make sure whoever you hire is good. They can make or break your revenue levels. Another way to provide good customer service is online demos or tutorials. Now VTC.com, if I go to a certain tutorial, I can take a look at some of the introductory information. I can click on one of these and actually play it and watch it. That gives me a good idea of what this course is like. Make sure you have an easy way for people to return items if they don't like it or it didn't work. Make sure they can return things easily and that you're very specific on what you allow to be returned and what the process is. Also offer fast shipping, maybe even free shipping. If you offer quick options to get that product to them they're going to buy it and be happy and pleased with you. Once you have your site or your store up and running, forums and blogs are places where people can get together and discuss products or discuss the company. It's a nice way to allow people to get together and talk about products. You'll get a lot more sales typically if you have those on your site. So at this point, what you want to do is study some good customer service examples. Take a look around, look at sites that are going to offer products just like yours or similar to yours and see what you think about their customer service offerings. Now if you're just beginning, be specific and stay focused on your customer service. If you offer a ticket system and that's what you're going to do, do it well and you'll be fine. If you're going to sell an item on eBay, if people ask questions, make sure you respond within 24 hours so they can get their answer quickly.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | E-Commerce: Selling Online |
| Author: | Melanie Hedgespeth |
| SKU: | 34370 |
| ISBN: | 978-1-61866-064-0 |
| Release Date: | 2012-09-25 |
| Duration: | 8.5 hrs / 144 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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