So, you’ve got a web site. You’re all excited because you think it’s going to bring you lots of business you never had before. Right? Well, only if you handle what comes in your cyberdoor with kid gloves.

You Only Have One Chance…

Nowhere is it more true that “you only have one chance to make a first impression” than on the Internet. The front door of your web site — your home page — is where your customer’s experience begins.

I like to think about an online experience from the perspective of my target visitor. By experience I mean the whole banana: the site’s download time, how easy it is to navigate once it’s loaded, how well my visitor understands what it is that I do, what I market or sell and how to buy it, and how my visitor is treated during the buying or contacting process. It’s important to always put yourself in these shoes, because without doing so, you’re not asking what you could do to better improve not only your site, but also your customer retention.

Customer Service Does Not Begin After the Order

For some reason, it seems to me that certain e- businesses out there think that customer service is only relevant after their visitor places an order. Well, duh, maybe the fact that they’re having trouble in the first place is why they haven’t placed an order!

To that end, customer service really needs to begin from the moment somebody clicks onto your site. The Boston Consulting Group, in a study released March 8, 2000, said that at least 4 out of 5 online purchasers have experienced one failed purchase. 28 percent of online purchasers who were frustrated in a purchase from an e-commerce site said they would not shop online anymore (that’s at all, folks!), 23 percent said they would not buy from that particular site anymore, and 6 percent would stop shopping at the company’s bricks and mortar stores, if they existed.

Keys to Great Customer Service

So how do you facilitate great customer service from the outset? Begin by building a great functioning site, a site where your product and information are easy to find. The more in-depth your product selection, the more potentially complicated your search-and-find process is going to be so the more thought is required to go into site development.

Second, try to anticipate problems and questions in advance and address them. Here’s where a good FAQ section can help. Although there are sure to be questions that cannot be completely anticipated, making an organized, logical, complete FAQ section can certainly help. Questions regarding shipping and handling, state taxes, and returns and exchanges most definitely ought to be addressed if you’re selling online. Also, learn to build upon your existing FAQ section by drawing on repeatedly asked emailed questions.

For e-commerce enabled web sites, be sure to make the check-out process as simple and as intuitive as possible. Oftentimes, users will abandon their shopping carts just because they can’t understand how to check out or can’t be bothered with how complicated it is. A February 2000 analysis of over 1,500 consumer sites by Resource Marketing, Inc. cited that shopping carts are being abandoned 88% of the time, only 25% of which could be attributed to glitches in the ordering process.

Information from this same study yielded some of the other main reasons why web sites are failing in their customer service:

• 56% of sites did not respond to emails within 48 hours; 26% did not respond at all
• offered poor telephone assistance
• delivered orders late and 6% of orders did not arrive at all.

New Online Customer Service Tools

In an effort to try to alleviate customer service problems and bring some humanity back into the electronic ordering process, some larger e-tailers are turning to outsourced, live assistant tools. Online customer service companies are cropping up all over the place, claiming to offer “dependable, real-time sales support and customer service to e-commerce.”

Examples of these companies include Live Person, PeopleSupport, LiveAssistance, FaceTime, and Brigade Solutions. They provide everything from live online chat, to voice communications (voice over your online connection), to interactive self-help databases.

There’s also the do-it-yourself approach of setting up chat rooms or message boards. Here you can have your own customer service representatives communicate with your on-site visitors either in live time, or via email responses. Companies such as ChatSpace and DigiChat make chat easy to install. If you don’t mind having a little ad space on your site in exchange for these services for free, check out Outblaze.com.

For informational-based web sites, a hybrid avenue is to recruit volunteer “experts” to answer questions, usually via email. This approach satisfies the need for human contact, but does not relying on an expensive outside company to do the work.

And The Point Is

I think one of the critical breakdowns when it comes to e-commerce is that businesses are afraid to look at their sites objectively. Either they’re too close to the project, have invested too much money in it to alter its path, or are too lazy or uninformed to handle their web site transactions better.

Maybe it’s too much to ask to try to break down the digital barrier and to synthesize some kind of warmth and personal touch when trying to engage someone on the Web. It seems that it all comes back to building some sort of trust -if a company is responsive, honest, informative and friendly, it’s more likely to be a place that people will be willing to do business with, over and over again.

Related posts:

1. Online Customer Service Tools
2. What FAQs Reveal About Online Customer Service
3. Customer Service Tools for Internet Business
4. New Advertising Service Offers Online Photos

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