Small Business Consulting

Author: Mike Martone
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 ....[MORE]

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