As much as customer service is all the rage, and heralded as the new marketing, it’s still viewed as a cost-center by most online businesses. This I believe, is entirely due to a defensive approach to customer care.
Defensive customer service can be defined as any type of reactive customer servicing such as answering calls, responding to email inquiries, or responding to live chat sessions.
Providing good defensive customer service will never result in a flood of …

Imagine walking into a brick-and-mortar store, asking an employee a question, and being outright ignored.
How about asking a specific, well-thought out question to a store clerk, then watching the employee thumb through a procedure manual, and read you a canned answer that completely misses your question.
Sounds ridiculous, but these are everyday occurrences in the land online customer service, where too many e-tailers hide behind the anonymity of eCommerce. Email responses take too long, contain …

Christmas is over, and now the fun begins…. the Handling the returns. As anyone whose ever sent a product back to an online retailer knows, the process is almost as fun as going to the dentist.
Some research suggests that even the thought of sending back a return is enough to keep people from buying. As such, it makes sense that an easy, hassle free return procedure will ensure that customers order again. In this post, …

When was the last time you actually took the time to find an answer on a FAQ page? What about searching through a customer service knowledge base?
For me, if information I need is not immediately accessible, I will leave a website immediately. Likewise, most web customers are impatient and demand information at their finger-tips. In the post, I thought I would share some common questions I have throughout the buying process on a website. If …

E-tailers have a lot to learn from traditional retailers. It seems that well-known eCommerce sites get away with atrocious usability mistakes simply because the internet as a shopping medium is growing so fast. Web managers may think that because sales numbers are up they must be doing everything right. For many online stores, nothing is further from the truth. Below I’ve listed what I consider to be the worst practices of eCommerce sites these days.

Requiring …

In my opinion, there’s two ways to build a well-known, enduring brand:

Spend tons of money on advertising and PR campaigns
Let your customers do the marketing for you

With the rising cost of most traditional forms of marketing, who wouldn’t prefer the second option? Unfortunately, very few customers ever become true fans. After all, many businesses focus entirely too much on customer acquisition and neglect customer retention. But in order for customers to become fans, not even …

Surprisingly, many ecommerce sites waste the thank you or receipt page by making it a dead end. Instead of encouraging your visitors to close the window, continue to engage your customers with one of the following tactics:
1. Refer a friend form: After the user completes the purchase, ask them if they would be willing to tell a friend or family member about your product or service. Obviously, if they trusted you enough to …

Hopefully, you’ve already begun to consider any necessary improvements to your site to accommodate the influx of holiday traffic.  Below I’ve compiled holiday improvement ideas for e-commerce sites. I hope you find something here useful.

Offer Bounce Back Discounts: Think about how much traffic your site will receive during the holidays. How can you harness that traffic to create year long business? Consider offering a good discount incentive for customers to come back and shop in January. …

When you consider the competitive advantages of an online retailer, customer service is usually not the first thing that comes to mind. Many e-commerce sites, even the large well-known ones, are known for impersonal, mediocre customer service practices. And yet, the few e-tailors that differentiate themselves on serving their customers such as Zappos become well-known case studies in client care. In this post, I’ll share some of the unique best practices I’ve seen over the …

E-commerce has one glaring problem. Because you can’t interact with your customers face to face, you often don’t know what the greatest barriers are that prevent purchases. The savvy e-commerce marketer will do everything in his power to make up for this by interacting with their customer base in other ways. In my experience, the difference between a customer centered company and a self centered company is how they deal with and encourage customer feedback. …