Question
How important do you feel customer service is at your website?
What types of services do you offer?
What types of services do your competitors offer?
Answer
Originally Posted by Kathleen
How important do you feel customer service is at your website?
What types of services do you offer?
What types of services do your competitors offer?
1. ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL.
2. Sales of collectibles, with shipping generally within 24 hours of payment, often the same day, and emails keeping the customer informed along every step of the transaction.
3. Sales of collectibles, don't know what type of customer service the competitors give, although it would be hard to beat ours
Answer
Minor rant:
In the last 2 weeks, I have contacted 5 auctioneers, two
companies and ebay with customer service issues.
All were simple questions.
Only ebay answered.
All auctioneers blew off questions about auction contents.
The other two companies must not be interested in selling their
products.
So.... Customer Service is, in my opinion, a must have.
Because poor or no responses will lose you sales pretty darn quick!
Alternatively, offer no contacts at all. At least then I KNOW I am
on my own. LOL
No website, but I pride myself on superior customer service with
my ebay sales.
Answer
Gotta agree with DMH
CS is critical in any business whether face to face or on the net.
We check and answer all emails same day if possible and ship the very next business day using priority mail (after confirmation of payment that is)
We also have a B&M business and have learned folks tend to come back over and over again if you're friendly, honest and offer good deals with a good product. In the B&M business, some just stop by to visit whether they buy or not and we don't mind
Answer
One solution which I would say is worth at least checking out is Hosted Support. They provide an affordable solution that helps you manage your customer service-related stuff in an automated way, and have a new solution for eBay.
I gotta be honest, although we use it at our company, and I've heard great things about it, I have not ever even seen the interface or know very much about how it works. I can ask the people who use it here if you guys want to know more, but I just don't have a ton of info about it other than our guys like it and they say it saves us a lot of time.
Answer
Here at Spoof-Proof:
1) I believe customer service is very important, and so is a Money Back Guarantee if something doesn't work out. You want the buyer to feel you are fair to them. We offer a 60-Day Money Back Guarantee.
2) I try to answer e-mails from customers the same day. I also have a Contact Us page on the web site that e-mails a user's questions to me. Sometimes, I have Live Help Chat available. There is also a Help section on our web site which provides answers to some common questions. On that same page, a user will also see links to about 8-10 tutorials I have made in the style of eBay Tutorials, with the 1-2-3-4 tabs. The program itself has a 10 minute Video Tutorial. And the welcome e-mail helps the user feel comfortable. Not to sound like I am bragging, but I am happy we have a members area on our web site so customers can re-download their software. They don't have to wait for us to get their license key information in an e-mail reply. It saves us time, and saves them time. One thing I want to do is to add a Contact Us form right into the program, so users can ask a question directly from the program.
3) A competitor I admire is the web-based auctionsniper service. They have translated their pages into different languages. They also have a very nice frequently asked questions page and a forum. I would like to go that route, too, but I am not sure if it would be very easy to administrate a forum, with the many spam scripts out there.
I guess the biggest thing is this: if you are being asked the same questions over and over, you should put your answers on your web site. Not only will you save time from having to reply, but the user will have instant gratification. Also, a Contact Us button should be prominent everywhere. (I should add such a button to the top of the page as well, actually.)
Answer
We take all questions from customers and also have a Forum for sellers and buyers alike to keep in contact, also with us as well.
Help is the main aim for our site.