Customer Service

Several months ago I was contacted by a local company who had recently re-designed their website. The company had hired their own in-house programmer and working with the marketing staff had re-designed their website, as well as their e-commerce platform.

In my initial conversation with them I asked why they had contacted me, given their new site was up and they had their own staff. The person who contacted me, stated that since the new website had gone live, sales were were actually falling instead of increasing as everybody had predicted. They were starting to get very concerned and felt that an independant company with experience in web development and e-commerce might be able to consult with them and stop the decline in sales.

I told the contact that I did consulting work and would be more than happy to review the website and arrange a follow-up meeting to go over the site and my recommendations. After my initial review of the site, I pretty much knew where the problem was.
On the day of the meeting, I asked that the web developer and marketing people also be present, so everybody could give some insight as to the design of the new site. The site looked great and the developer was a very capable programmer, but his inexperience was really visible in one key area, customer service.

As I went through the site with everybody I asked where the Help section was, the answer I received was "on the contact page". So we went to that page and I asked again "where was the help", the developer pointed to a contact form and said anybody could send a question via the form. There was also another omission on the contact page and that was a phone number, in fact the phone numbers had been removed from the entire site. When I asked why there were no contact numbers, the developer said that kids now days don't want to talk on the phone and everything was done online.

I asked the owner of the company what the average age of their customer base was, and he said mid 30's to early 40's. I then said "their clients did not sound like kids to me", and I believe at that moment everybody had figured out what I had suspected, if you don't want to assist your customers, why would they want to buy from you?

I spoke with the company contact not long ago and they mentioned that sales had improved dramatically and they were very pleased with the direction they were heading.

I personally believe that customer service is the most important part of any business and in a tight market as we are experiencing now, take the extra time to provide superior customer service, your clients and customers will remember that.