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 pat, irrelevant answers, or even worse, never come.

The novelty internet shopping has faded. No longer does the convenience of “anytime anywhere” shopping trump service. As the internet landscape matures, I believe companies will need to differentiate themselves using more ways, including service.

Why Is Online Service More Important than Offline?

1. Because Competition Is Closer: No longer is your competitor across town or down the street, they’re just a click away. Customers are becoming more sophisticated, and they demand better service online.
2. Because Negative PR Spreads Like a Virus: Consumer advocate groups such as Consumer Affairs and Complaints.com give customers easy avenues to express their discontent about the service they received. Just ask Dell, who is still reeling from negative publicity about its failed customer service practices.
3. Because Competing only on Price and Selection is Bad Business: Now that there’s a plethora of bargain basement priced e-tailers in nearly every niche, low prices are no longer a justification for bad service. Smart retailers, especially smaller businesses, will differentiate themselves with service, knowing that service is harder to emulate. In addition, someone will always offer a better selection than you. Just look at Walmart, who’s now selling SEO services.

Customer Service: A Cost Center or Profit Center?

Customer service has traditionally been viewed as a cost-center, having relatively nothing to do with increases or decreases in sales, customer longevity, and brand loyalty. I believe this is especially true with eCommerce, where the lack of face to face interaction creates a disconnect between customers and eCommerce managers. In the brick and mortar world, it’s not uncommon for managers to work the sales floor once in a while in order to keep a finger on the pulse of their customers. I wonder how many eCommerce directors know or care what their customers think.

A few months ago, I did a post on 25 ways to improve online customer service. I wish more e-tailers would adopt these suggestions.

Anyway, if you’ve made it through my whole rant on internet customer service, I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinion. Is customer service as important in the online world as the offline? Is the patience of internet shoppers growing thin, or will they accept sub-par service in order to save a few bucks buying online?

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, I’ll share some best practices for handling return I’ve learned from dealing with internet retailers in the past.

1. Answer the Basics: Clearly explaining the process is the obvious first step in handling a return. Chinook Webs has a great example of an effective return policy that answers what, when, where, and how. For example, what products can be returned? How long do customers have to return them? Where do they back the merchandise?
2. Keep Customers Updated: When you receive a return shipment, email the customer. When you begin processing a return, email the customer. When you refund their money or send out the exchange merchandise, email the customer. Constant progress updates will keep customers from contacting you about the status. In addition, they will appreciate the thoughtfulness.
3. Find out Why: A “no questions asked” return policy is great marketing, but tells you little about what’s causing customers to return products. Find a non-pushy way of asking them why they’re returning the merchandise. This can be a simple question on the return form or an email survey sent out after the transaction. Emphasize the information will be used to improve your products.

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Tags: customer service E commerce e commerce return policies ecommerce return best practices internet returns simplifying the online return process

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 questions such as these are answered on the spot, rather than through a hard to find FAQ page or knowledge base, I am much more likely to buy.

Product Pages:

When a customer reaches the product page for an item he or she is considering purchasing, many questions arise. The suggestions below are in addition to the obvious questions about the product itself. We’re going to assume that your product pictures and description answer those.

• Is the product in-stock? - Most of us have received an unwelcome email from an internet store telling us our item is out of stock. If you are confident in your inventory counts, assure your customer that the item they are viewing is in-stock and ready to ship.
• How much will shipping cost? - Seeing the product price is not enough. Mentally, customers want to figure in the cost of shipping as well. Reminders about free shipping are welcome sight on the product page.
• Where can I find similar products? - Showing related products (make sure they are relevant) can greatly decrease the bounce rate of your product pages. They increase the likelihood than your visitor will continue browsing if they aren’t interesting in the item they are viewing.

Shopping Cart Page:

Battles of conversion are often lost on the shopping cart page due to unanswered questions.

• What’s in my cart? - Customers tend to forget which items are in their shopping carts. Simply showing the name of the product isn’t enough. All shopping carts should show pictures of the items to help customers remember what they’re buying.
• How do the items in my cart compare with each other? - Shopping carts are often used for comparison shopping, not as a final repository for items that will be purchased. By allowing users to view relevant product features in a side by side comparison, you’ll simplify the buying decision.
• How can I pay? - At this point, customers begin thinking about payment options. Showing credit card logos, the PayPal emblem, and other 3rd party payment option logos will give users the confidence to continue.
• What is your return policy? - When I used to work in retail, the number one question asked of me at the cash register was “what is your return policy?” A link to a pop-up explaining your “hassle free returns policy” would be helpful in the shopping cart.

Contact Information (during Checkout)

When you begin asking for personal contact information, red flags may go off in your customer’s mind.

• What is this website’s privacy policy? - How is the information you are capturing used? Will it be used for marketing, 3rd parties, or only for order fulfillment? A link to your privacy policy would be much appreciate by many customers.
• What info is necessary? - Be sure to clarify what information is necessary and what is optional. Most site’s do this with a simple asterisk (*) to denote a required field.
• Can I opt-out? - Many customers are paranoid about being added to a mailing list. It’s not worth losing an order over, so provide a check box that allows shoppers to opt out of marketing communications.

Shipping Information (during Checkout)

Shipping is always an area of uncertainty and confusion. If customers can’t be assured their package will arrive safe, sound, and in-time, they will abandon the order. I’m surprised at how few eCommerce sites link to their shipping policies from the checkout pages.

• How will my order ship? - Customers sometimes have preferences as to which carrier will be used. Providing this information will assuage their concerns.
• When will my product ship? - Make sure customers understand the processing time involved. If possible, always ship next business day.
• Do you ship to PO Boxes, APOs or International addresses? - Linking to your shipping policy will ensure customers understand your shipping restrictions.

Payment Information (during Checkout)

Even after years of shopping on the internet, I still find myself hesitating a moment before entering my credit card information. All sorts of questions arise at this point in the conversion funnel.

• Is the transaction secure? - Having click-through verification through your SSL provider is a good faith measure.
• How do I input my credit card number? - If your payment page requires a certain format for entering credit card information, such as no dashes between the numbers, be sure to specify that.
• Where do I find the CVV Code? - Personally, I dislike requiring the 3 or 4 digit CVV code in order to process a payment. However, if your site uses it, be sure to link to a good description of what is is, where to find it, and why it is being asked for.

Receipt (Order Confirmation) Page:

Online retailers too often waste their receipt pages by displaying an order confirmation page that basically says, “thank you for your order, now get off our website.” Receipt pages are a great place to preemptively answer common customer service inquiries.

• When will my product ship? - Now that your customer has handed over their money, when will you deliver the merchandise?
• When will my product arrive? - Providing delivery estimates from your shipping carrier(s) will prevent needless inquiries to your customer service department. Don’t over-promise, just give honest shipping time estimates to the delivery location.
• How do I track my order? - From the moment the order is placed, customers expect to be able to monitor the progress of the processing and shipping of their order. Linking to your order tracking page would be very much appreciated.
• How can I change my order? - The order confirmation page is often the place where the customer realizes they screwed up and ordered the wrong product or entered incorrect shipping information. Providing information on how to edit their order will prevent them from panicking.

The suggestions above are by no means exhaustive, so please leave your comments with other common questions you see during the checkout process.

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.

1. Requiring Login to Order: I would agree with Get Elastic’s Linda Bustos that this is one of many e-tailers’ favorite usability mistakes. Requiring registration is very obnoxious, especially when you have yet to establish any relationship with a retailer, and you have not idea if you’ll ever purchase again.
2. Not Showing Shipping Prices Upfront: I’ve abandoned dozens of online orders because of this. Sure, asking for the customers address may ensure a more accurate shipping cost for you, but its not worth losing a customer over. In my opinion, the best practice is to simply base your shipping costs on the merchandise total. It might not be the most accurate way, but if you average it out, it works great.
3. Vague, Hard to Find Return Policies: For me, returning products to an online retailer is right up there with getting my teeth drilled. Don’t make the process worse by hiding your return policy deep within your site or requiring your customers to jump through hoops to complete the process. Rarely do e-tailers make their return policy a selling point or competitive advantage. Wherever I can, I like to use the words “No-Hassle Return Policy” to reassure the customer that the process is quick and easy.
4. Poor SEO: Build it, and they will not come, unless your eCommerce site is on good terms with Google. Retailers tend to forget that search engines are the highways and byways of the internet. An eCommerce site not optimized for search is equivalent to a brick and mortar store conveniently located underground.
5. Poor Product Descriptions: Your product descriptions are the closest thing you have to an face to face salesperson. Make them work for you. Improving your product descriptions is one of the easiest, yet most neglected ways to improve your online sales. If your product catalog is large enough to justify hiring a copy-writer, than do it. If not, hire someone on the side to write your copy.
6. Lack of Filtering & Sorting: Imagine yourself walking unto a used car lot. What do you ask the salesperson in order to narrow down your options? You’ll likely say something like “show me all the vehicles this color, with this amount of mileage, or this make and model.” The same principle should be applied to your product department pages. Don’t overwhelm your audience with too many options. Let them filter down by criteria such as colors, sizes, or brand. Also, let them sort the listings by price, newness, popularity, etc.
7. Hard to Find Checkout Button: Imagine not being able to find the checkout lane at a grocery store. Many online stores assume shoppers know that the shopping cart is the first step of the checkout process. To prevent confusion of your customers, always have a clear “checkout” button visible on every page.
8. Poor Merchandising: If you owned a brick and mortar store, I’m going to bet you would walk your aisles every day to ensure your products are merchandised properly. Yet I think website owners expect their online stores to run themselves, and rarely take time for this important audit. Once a day, try to shop your store as if you were going to buy something. I’ll bet you’ll find one or two things out of place.
9. Getting too Personal: Do you really need your customer’s date of birth to complete an order? Even asking for information such as email or telephone number may arouse suspicion in your customers. Ask yourself an important question for each additional form field you add, “Is this worth losing a sale over?”
10. No Calls to Action: Don’t just assume your visitors will click on your image maps or “Click Here” links. Make your call to action buttons big, bold, and unmistakably clear. Every page of the conversion funnel (landing page to department page to product page to checkout) should clearly define the next step in the process.
11. No Error Reporting: From a technical point of view, it’s very simple to setup error notifications when certain unexpected events occur on your website. Montastic offers a completely free website monitoring service. In addition, ask your webmaster to setup email alerts for every time a 500 (internal server) error or 404 (page not found) error occurs.
12. Inaccurate Cross Sells: Embarrassing cross-sells can sometimes lead to more than just more than just missed opportunities. If your system for suggesting add-ons, cross sells, or up-sells doesn’t work, you’re probably better off not using it.
13. Unreachable Customer Service: Online retailers are typically not famous for their customer service. Phone numbers and emails should be listed prominently on every page. Responses to customer requests should be prompt and courteous. In a previous post, I outlined 25 tips for improving your online customer service.

I’m sure I didn’t mention everything, so be sure to leave a comment with your thoughts or experiences. 

Like the tips listed above? Get 3 of your own…

About PWM

Justin Palmer offers expert eCommerce consulting and SEO consulting in Orange County, California. Justin also has written an e-Commere e-book entitled The e-Commerce Roadmap.

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

1. Spend tons of money on advertising and PR campaigns
2. 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 traditional retention strategies will suffice. Companies must go out of their way and transform their customers into friends, advisors, and partners. Below I’ve listed some ideas I’ve either used or seen used to accomplish this purpose.

1. Street Teams, Brand Reps or Brand Ambassadors: Street Team marketing is a fascinating concept that developed from the underground music industry. It centers around a grass root strategy where your fans do the marketing for you. Using this strategy, an online retailer might give customers access to branded wallpapers, screensavers, or avatars. Customers are encouraged to copy and paste banners ads into their personal Myspace profiles, blogs, or email signatures. Customers can easily email friends through easy to use tell-a-friend forms. Some online Street Teams, such as C28 or Threadless, combine these tactics with a customer referral program, allowing users to earn store credit for sales referred to the site. Street Team marketing will not work for everyone, but it can be powerful if this style of marketing fits your target audience and brand.
2. Create a Community: Whether its through forums, Myspace, Facebook, or your own sub community site, allow your customers to interact with others of similar interests. Circuit City recently launched a social networking site complete with forums, blogs, photo galleries, and user profiles. Hot Topic has a robust Myspace profile with over 35,000 members. Only time will tell if social networking continues to grow, but for now it’s inexpensive and effective brand exposure.
3. Rewards Programs: Rewards programs are nothing new, but they work well for creating brand loyalty. Maybe your online store doesn’t offer the cheapest prices, but if you let customers earn points redeemable for merchandise, they just might overlook that.
4. Recognize your Brand Warriors: Be sure to recognize top spenders by displaying their stats for all to see. Recognizing your top customers will only encourage them to spend more. One company I worked for decided to send hand-written thank you notes to their top customers along with a gift card.
5. Share and Listen: How well does your business interact with your audience? Corporate blogs, forums, customer generated product reviews and surveys can be great two way communication channels. Run your business like a democracy. Let your customers vote with their opinions and preferences. Policies and procedures should from the bottom up, not the other way around.

Be sure to leave your comments with examples of anyone successfully using these or other brand building tactics.

 Brand Loyalty: Building Customers for Life: Download (142)

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 give you their own money, they might be willing to recommend you to a friend.

2.   How to Track your Order: In order to prevent needless queries to your customer service department, you might consider showing customers the process for tracking their order. Show them how to login, and find out when the order has shipped and what the current status is on the delivery.

3.   Show products related to those ordered: By doing this, you might be surprised at how many people will immediately order again. Just be sure that your customer service team is prepared to deal with customer requesting to add additional items to their orders.

4.   Feedback Survey: Ask your shoppers about the experience they just had. Because the experience is fresh on their mind, they will tell you about any frustrations while using your site.

5.   Coupon for Next Purchase: Encourage customers to bounce right back with a coupon for their next purchase. Make it clear, however, that this discount cannot be used on previous purchases.

In choosing one of the above tactics, your company priorities will apply. For example, if you’re most concerned about providing preemptive customer service, then you might be inclined to use the receipt page to clarify how to track the order. If you’re more concerned about driving sales, you might choose to show related products.

A word of caution applies to these ideas. Before you encourage your customer to perform another action, make it very clear that the purchase process is complete, and order has been submitted. In addition, always send an email confirmation receipt.

By using one of the above tactics, hopefully you’ll steer clear of the mistake many ecommerce sites make on their Thank You pages and continue to build a long lasting, profitable relationship with your customers. 

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.

1. 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. You can automatically email them a coupon after each order, or send one along with the package. Make sure that this coupon is not valid until after the holidays.
2. Loosen Up on Your Return Policy: While a 30 day return policy is commonplace for the rest of the year, it may scare off early shoppers during the holidays. Make it clear to your visitors that you will accept returns and exchanges on all Christmas gift purchases.
3. Use a Website Monitoring Service: Odds are, your website will go down at least once during the busy holiday season. If you’re not big enough to have a 24 hour IT department monitoring your server, signup for a website monitoring service such as Alertsite, who will email or text message you if your site goes down.
4. Gift Receipts: Gift givers hate revealing how much they spent on a gift. Make sure you allow customers to click a Gift receipt option that will hide the prices on the packing list from the recipient.
5. Gift Messages: Let your customers add a personal message to their gift. For simplicity, you can have the message appear on the packing list which will already be included in the box.
6. Determine Shipping Cut-off Dates: This is quite possibly the most important information to communicate to customers during the holidays. Check with your shipping carriers to determine what the cutoff days are for the various methods of shipping.
7. Prominent “No Hassle” Return Policy: Your return policy should be easy to find. Consider re-packaging it as a ”no hassle” policy in order to calm the fears of first time buyers.
8. Holiday Graphical Themes: Show some holiday spirit and redesign some of the artwork on your site with a holiday theme. Hopefully, this will get visitors in a buying mood.
9. Increase Server Capacity: Talk with your web host about how you can increase your server performance during the holiday rush. You don’t want to end up like Walmart or Amazon on last year’s cyber Monday. Here’s a sad, but funny example of Macy’s servers getting overloaded.
10. Checkup on your Domain, Web hosting, and Merchants: God forbid that your credit card or domain name expires during the Christmas rush. Double check the basics just to be safe.
11. Audit Your Online Product Catalog: Have a detail oriented person visit each of your product pages to ensure accuracy. Check for typos, broken images, and bad hyperlinks.
12. Seasonal SEO and PPC Landing Pages: Don’t forget to optimize your SEO and PPC campaigns for seasonal keywords. Visitors searching habits change around the holidays, so your marketing strategy should as well.
13. Mystery Shop your Site: Either do it yourself or hire a professional service to mystery shop your site. Mystery shopping should include ordering, contacting customer service, and returning the product back to you.
14. Learn from Your Past Mistakes: Just for fun, checkout your site at Christmas time last year on the wayback machine. You’ll likely spot issues that can be improved this year.
15. Learn from Your Competitors: Also, checkout what your competition was doing last year. It may give you some tips on what or what not to do this year.
16. Build up those Wish Lists: Start encouraging your visitors to build their wish lists now. Come Christmas, they’ll know exactly where to find what they want. Check out this post for Wish list improvement ideas.
17. Offer Online Gift Certificates: If your site doesn’t offer online gift certificates, and your visitors don’t find that perfect gift, they will just leave. Gift certificates make great last minute gifts. In addition, they’re a great way to drive sales at the beginning of next year.
18. Gifts by Price: Organize and suggest gifts by price range. For example, highlight gifts under $10, 25, 50, 100 or whatever price points are appropriate for your business.
19. Gifts by Person: Organize gifts intended for different people groups such as kids, teens, parents, grandparents, etc.
20. Get 404 and 500 Error Notifications: Talk with your webmaster and ask him to setup a script that notifies him every time a 404 (page not found) or 500 (internal server error) occurs on your site. You might be surprised how often errors occur. When we set this up for one of my clients, they received over 1,000 errors in one day. These errors can be costly, especially at Christmas time.
21. Stocking Stuffers: Be sure to highlight low cost products that would make good stocking stuffers. These can be a great way to increase your average order total.
22. Shipping and Return Info on Product Pages: Shipping and return issues will be top of mind for your customers at this time. Assure them your policies are convenient and fair by linking to your shipping and returns page from your product pages.
23. Offer Gift Wrapping: Many don’t like the idea of sending gifts to friends or family wrapped in nothing but bubble wrap or Styrofoam popcorn. If you can, offer gift wrapping services to your online customers. Be sure to charge enough to cover the labor and material costs for this additional service.
24. Emphasize Urgency: Let your customers know it’s not safe to wait until the last minute. To prevent shipping issues or product stock outs, encourage your customers to shop early.
25. Bundle Products: Gift selection is much easier when related items are grouped together in some sort of gift basket or bundle.

Hopefully you’ve found something here useful for your site. Be sure to leave a comment if you have any questions or suggestions.  

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 last few years that serve to differentiate companies in customer service.

1. Assign a Personal Customer Service Rep: Along with the order confirmation receipt that you send to your customers, also automatically assign each customer a personal representative that will field their questions. Send the email from this representative’s name, and include their contact info. Customers will be impressed that they have a “personal” representative assign specifically to them. For more info on this tactic, checkout this post on DermaTechRX.
2. Human Touch: Many online shoppers struggle with trusting an online merchant due to the lack of face to face interaction. Mitigate this weakness by showing pictures of your customer service staff. Christian retailer C28 shows the picture of their customer service manager on the Help page as well as on every order confirmation email. In addition, below the picture is the manager’s direct contact info. Something like this can go a long way to instill trust in your company.
3. Call Customers Who Abandon Orders: When a customer starts an order but doesn’t finish it, follow up with a phone call to find out if there were any problems. Customers appreciate the gesture, and you will likely save many sales in the process.
4. Free Upgraded Shipping: Surprise select customers by upgrading their shipping to 1 or 2 express. If you do this, be sure to send them an email letting them know they have been upgraded. This strategy was pioneered by Zappos.
5. Same Day Shipping: Most websites have a policy of shipping orders 1 or 2 business days after they are placed. If possible, selectively ship some orders the same day. The speedy delivery will be appreciated, though not expected by your customers.
6. Increase # of Reps: It goes without saying that if you have a higher representative to customer ratio, you will have the time to better serve your clients. While not every business can afford this, if you want to differentiate yourself with outstanding customer service, it’s a must.
7. Hand-written thank you on Packing Slip: Most packing slips are dull, impersonal, and useful only if you need to return the merchandise. On rare occasions, I’ve received orders where the packing list featured a hand-written, personalized thank you from a staff member. While this may not be practical for every order, it is a great way to impress select customers. Another idea might be to include the business card with contact info for a manager.
8. Follow Up Surveys: Consider sending a survey email out with every order confirmation. While not every customer will complete it, your customers will know you care enough to ask their opinion.
9. Extensive FAQ Knowledge Base: Surprisingly, one of the easiest ways to improve your customer satisfaction may be to prevent needless customer interactions in the first place. No matter how friendly your call center representative, no customer will be pleased if they have to call you in order to answer a simple question like “how do I return a product?” Prevent situations like this by maintaining a searchable FAQ knowledge base that answers every reasonable question.
10. Live Chat: Many customers dislike the thought of sitting on hold for even a few minutes. Offering a live chat option can be an inexpensive way of answering questions for your visitors, and reducing the call volume for your call center.
11. Improve After Hour Call Center: If your business employs a 3rd party after hour call center that is off-site, make sure you frequently monitor the quality of care they are rendering. Make sure they are empowered to serve your customers as effectively as possible. If your primary call center is 3rd party, seriously consider bringing it in house. While this is not always the most affordable option, it’s necessary if you desire to give your clients your absolute best.
12. Prominent Customer Testimonials: Place customer testimonials on more than just the “testimonial” page. Zappos features them right on their main customer service page. A word of caution applies here though. If you’re going to “brag” so to speak about your service, make sure you follow through!
13. Detailed Product Pages: Answer questions before they are asked by always having thoroughly detailed product pages. Include all the relevant info a customer would want to know about your products. For more ideas on this topic, checkout my previous post on 25 ways to improve your product page.
14. Customer Centric Slogan: Show your dedication to customer care by prominently featuring a customer centered slogan that summarizes your company’s practices. A great example of this would be Zappos’ famous slogan on their home page: “We are a service company that happens to sell shoes.”
15. Free Return Shipping: One of the greatest stumbling blocks to online ordering is the thought of having to return the product. Consider sending customers a pre-paid return shipping label in the case of a product needing to be returned. Because this is rarely done by e-commerce stores, you will certainly set yourself apart in the mind of your customer.
16. Automatic Price Protection: Always honor sale prices of items that were previously purchased by customers. They need to be able to shop with this confidence. Better yet, automatically notify customers when items they have purchased in the past go on sale. Offer to apply the price difference toward a future purchase or just refund the amount. Sound crazy? Maybe, but it’s small cost that can win a customer for life.
17. Lenient Return Policy: Make sure your return policy is not unnecessarily complicated or rigid. How many times have you shopped at a certain retailer because their lenient return policy gave you the confidence you needed to buy? (Think Costco vs. Walmart!)
18. Thank You Calls: Call select customers and thank them for ordering. This personalized gesture will blow them away.
19. Thank You Emails: Email certain customers and thank them for their business. Be sure to include something personalized in the email that will convince them it’s not just something generic sent to everyone.
20. Do More than Fix Your Mistakes: When your business makes a mistake, be sure that you exceed your customer’s expectations when fixing it. If an item was mistakenly left out of a shipment, don’t just a apologize, offer that item for free. Many businesses find their most loyal customers result from a highly satisfying resolution to a problem.
21. Fix Other’s Mistakes: If a shipment is delayed or lost due to the fault of the shipping carrier, don’t just blame UPS, offer a solution. Offer to promptly re-ship the item, or at the very least, offer to take care of the problem with the carrier so the customer doesn’t have to.
22. Guaranteed Email Response Time: Most customers expect an email inquiry to be answered within at most 24 hours. If you can, guarantee a response time faster than this. Also, acknowledge the receipt of an email inquiry by employing an auto responder.
23. Secret Shopping: Used extensively by brick-and-mortar retailers, secret shopping is a great way to identify problems and keep your customer service staff on their toes.
24. Upgrade Your CRM Tools: Proper technology can go a long way to improving customer care. At the very least, ensure that your staff has the ability to view the history of previous interactions with a customer. It’s very frustrating when you have to repeatedly explain the situation to a representative.
25. Personalize Everything: Always great customers by name on the home page, and offer them personalized product recommendations based on previous orders.

I once heard it said that “the enemy of good is not bad, it’s mediocre.” Too many online retailers struggle with mediocre customer service. Many businesses fail to realize their customer base is also powerful marketing machine. If treated right, they can become to most effective viral marketing campaign imaginable. Treated poorly, and they can become a PR disaster.

If you enjoyed this post, please also checkout 25 ways to improve your shopping cart and 25 ways to improve your checkout.

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. Below, I’ll share some benefits of surveying your customers.

1. Measure Customer Satisfaction: I encourage my customers to move beyond simple “how would you rate your experience” questions. Delve into specifics. Ask them about checkout. Ask them about the shopping cart. What about customer service? The returns process? If you questions are vague, then your results will be less than impressive.
2. Determine Future Improvments: One of my favorite things to do in a survey is to ask customers about potential ways of improving the website. When your tech team is wavoring between two or more improvement projects, a survey is a great way to find out which would benefit customers more.
3. Capture Customer Demographics: Have you ever wondered what the average age or your customer is? What about the percentage of male/female? Customer surveys are a great way to learn more about your client base.

Anytime you ask something of your customers, it’s a good idea to provide an incentive. If you site uses coupon codes, you might want to offer a $5 discount for those who fill out the survey.

If the idea of creating a system to create and track survey responses sounds intimidating, there are companies such as Constant Contact and KeySurvey that offer services that simplify creating and analyzing customer surveys.

Be sure to let me know your experience in this area.

It’s not often that you are blown away by the customer service of an online retailer. After all, how much of an impression can a company make when the only contact points are usually email or a help page?

Recently, I purchased a cream for the Eczema problem I have on my skin from DermaTechRX. Immediately following the purchase, I received the typical order confirmation receipt. Not long later, I received another email from a name I didn’t recognize, in the form of a reply. The subject line however, made it clear it was regarding my order from DermaTechRX.

Opening the email, I found personalized letter. Below is an excerpt from this impressive piece of correspondence.

“I have been assigned as your “Personal” Customer Service Representative and my primary role is to help guide you through the process of getting rid of your Eczema symptoms quickly, so If you have any questions or need further assistance, please do not hesitate to call me.”

The Letter went on to discuss several of the products they offer for treating Eczema. The letter concluded with…

“PS - Please let me know how our products are working for you. We try very hard to give support and advice to our customers.”

As I said, I was blown away. I had been contacted by someone in the company who actually cares about helping my skin problem. Sure, it was probably automatically generated. And sure, they probably send out hundreds of these a day. Regardless, how many companies assign you a “personal Customer service representative?” Most likely, I will not need to use the help of this person, however it’s nice to know where to go if I need assistance.

It’s nice to see how smaller e-commerce companies continue to innovate by creating programs such as this. I am definately going to recommend doing something similiar to this to all my e-commerce clients.