Archive for the 'Customer Service' Category
Online Customer Service-An Oxymoron?
Online customer service is not as hard as you think. It’s not quite as simple as smiling when someone enters a retail store, but you certainly can convey that your business is focused on meeting customer needs.
Websites have been around long enough that it’s easy to compare and see which ones make it easy to do business and which are causing their customers grief. Try it yourself. Go to a few sites you have never visited before and see how easy it is to locate specific information. Then go to a few of the rock star online retailers and see how they do the job.
There are a lot of rules to good online customer service. Here are a couple of my favourites.
- First stop, create a site that is easy to use. And I don’t mean easy for you or your coder. I mean it needs to be dead easy for your site visitors to use. Frankly, even if you’re the one building it, your opinion doesn’t matter nearly as much as your prospective visitors’ needs do.
- Make sure there is a way to contact your company available from the home page and every other page in the site. And don’t bury it in text at the bottom! Make it bright yellow if you have to, but make it stand out. Often this is done somewhere in the top right quadrant of the page and many site visitors look here first.
- If you’re selling online, let people know the price before they input their personal information. Would you pull out your credit card and ring through a purchase before you know the price in a bricks and mortar store? Many site visitors will opt out of the selling process if they have to provide their personal data before seeing the full price of the product, including shipping.
In a nutshell, make it easy and you’re more likely to make the sale.
Stuck on the Tarmac and wishing I had flown with Air Canada
We often associate companies with negative qualities. A few of them have such negative brands that they fail to attract customers at all. Neither Wal-Mart nor McDonalds are known for their high quality and just the mention of Exxon brings out images of oil slick and pollution. Negative brands are often the result of poor ethical decision on the company’s part but more often than not, customer service is the reason why people dislike certain companies. For those unfortunate enough to have to deal with Telus on a regular basis, you will know that their customer service isn’t that great.
But Telus isn’t the worse culprit in Canada. No the company that brings all Canadians in agreement is Air Canada. Everyone has a story of having to pay for drinks, no food being served on 5 hour flights, being squished in seats so tight your legs can’t move. They are the worst company to fly with.
When booking our latest trip I had three goals. Avoid Air Canada, avoid Charles the Gaulle airport and lay-overs. We found the perfect flight with KLM. Leaving from Vancouver we would fly to Amsterdam, then Amsterdam Bordeaux. Unfortunately last night after spending an hour or so on the tarmac, we were told that our plane wouldn’t leave and we would have to come back today. After contacting KLM and chatting to them for what seemed like 3 hours, we are now booked on North West Airlines leaving today at 2pm. We’ll be flying from Vancouver to Detroit, Detroit to Paris, then Paris to Bordeaux, which involves 3 lay-overs and the dreaded Charles de Gaulle airport. All of this because Air Canada has a bad reputation!
It will be interesting to see if KLM will follow up on this situation and contact us to apologize. I’ll worry about that later, if I can just get to France…