What you do off site matters more than what you do on site
Written on April 29th 2008, filed under Usability with 1 comment.
Here’s one of my favourite pet peeves: off site support. Whether it’s replying to an e-mail or answering a telephone call it should be done absolutely spot on. The things you do off site can make or break your reputation. Not responding to an e-mail or having terrible phone support can cripple a websites survival chances.
- When you provide e-mail support make sure that the mail address works. I’m surprised I’ve had to include this in this list but one company I’ve had to deal with lately asked people to contact them at an e-mail address that didn’t exist.
- Reply to each e-mail, even if they were sent to the wrong address (think sales@ instead of support@). Nothing frustrates people more then not receiving a reply to a question they had. If you don’t care about your customers, why should they care about you?
- Never send a mail that starts with “Dear customer”. You know all there is to know about your customers so personalise your correspondence.
- Why is it that “Your call is important to us”, but it isn’t important enough to call them back? Don’t waste your customers time, call them back.
- I know that support scripts make life easier, but when I’m calling to say that my internet connection is down please don’t ask me if I’ve tried your online support site.
All of these are things that will leave a positive impression on your customers. If your site’s great, improve your service off site. It’ll leave a better impression and that surely can’t hurt your business.
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Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.JayAre - May 2nd 2008 - 0:46
“I know that support scripts make life easier, but when I’m calling to say that my internet connection is down please don’t ask me if I’ve tried your online support site.”
That’s right, try finding an ISP phone number, might be quite hard… unless of course you want to become their customer.