Topic: Member Workshop: The Golden Rule of Customer Support
Host: hostedsupport Date: Tuesday 08/12 Time: 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. Pacific time Location: Workshop Board
Description: In this workshop, Jerad Schempp, COO of Certified Solution Provider Hosted Support will discuss his Golden Rule of customer support and review some essential elements of providing outstanding customer support to help ensure happier customers and increased sales.
We love workshops to be interactive, so please feel free to ask your questions that directly relate to this topic.
Added note: If you click on the "Watch this discussion" link, you will receive an email each time someone posts to the workshop.
Stop Watching: If at any time you no longer want to receive updates on a thread you are watching, just click on the link titled "Stop Watching Thread" found in the specific thread being watched. Also you can remove any watched thread by clicking on the "Watched Discussions" link located in the log in bar and deleting the watched thread.
If you're new to the discussion boards, please be sure to check out the board tutorial:
A from our Legal Department: The statements and opinions made in this discussion board are those of the workshop host only and do not reflect eBay policy or eBay's opinion with respect to such statements.
Hello everyone! Glad you could make it to my workshop. I hope you have plenty of questions and comments on my topic because I’m ready to “chat”.
Our eBay ID is hostedsupport and Hosted Support is an eBay Certified Solution Provider. We’ve been providing customer support solutions since 2003 and have an eBay Compatible Application called ezSupport for eBay that’s built exclusively for eBay sellers. I’m very excited to share our experience and knowledge regarding customer support issues, especially how you can increase sales by providing excellent customer support.
Today I’m going to share what I believe is the Golden Rule of customer support and discuss some of the essential elements for providing outstanding customer support. If you’ve been selling for a long time, you may consider this Customer Support 101, but even experienced sellers need a strong foundation in the basics of supporting customers effectively to ensure customer satisfaction and bring in repeat sales.
At Hosted Support, we believe the cornerstone of every successful seller’s business is excellent customer support. You can offer new items or low prices to attract buyers, but unless those buyers are satisfied with the transaction and you as a seller, you won’t be in business long. Effective customer support is all about sending buyers away happy enough that they will come back to you again and also provide positive feedback for you, which will in turn attract new buyers for your listings.
And the essence of outstanding customer support is forming a positive relationship with your customers, i.e. a relationship that customers want to continue. The best way to accomplish this is to think of each customer as an individual, not a faceless “customer” with an eBay ID. Now I know it’s difficult to individualize customers when you’re in the middle of a hectic work day, but the best way to deal with customers is to put the shoe on the other foot and think of how you like to be treated when you’re a customer.
That’s why my Golden Rule of customer support is: “Do unto your customers as you would have them do unto you.”
It’s simple. It’s easy to remember. And as long as you keep customer support’s Golden Rule in mind while dealing with customers, you really can’t go wrong. Following the Golden Rule isn’t difficult either. It just takes some thought and the right tools. So here’s my list of essentials for treating your customers the way you’d like to be treated.
Provide Easy Access to Information When you’re trying to bid on an item or make a purchase on a website, are you annoyed if you can’t find vital information such as shipping details or a return policy? If you answered “Yes” to that question (and I know you did) then your customers will feel the same way. So when you’re designing your auction listings make sure to provide easy access to information.
The “easy access” part of providing information is probably the most difficult issue. You should include full information so customers can make informed decisions without having to submit a lot of questions to you. But you don’t want your listings to be inundated with long paragraphs or descriptions that are difficult to decipher. It’s best to keep your item descriptions as clear and concise as possible by laying out your pages to take advantage of spacing, grouping information intuitively, and reducing blobs of text with bullet points.
You should also implement FAQs on all your auction listings to give your customers another avenue for easy access to information. FAQs work great for those questions you get over and over again pertaining to general information. You know the ones I’m talking about: “Do you ship internationally?”, “Will you combine ship?”, “What’s your return policy?”, etc. eBay’s FAQ feature can be used to add a limited number of FAQs to your listings, and you can use Hosted Support’s ezSupport for eBay tool to provide an unlimited number of FAQs that you can organize by category and that customers can search with keywords and natural-language questions.
Respond to Customers ASAP Do you like waiting hours or even days for a response when you submit a question to a seller or an ecommerce website? I thought not. The longer it takes for a customer to receive a reply, the less important that customer will feel and the less likely they will want to do business with you. It’s even possible that after a day or so the customer will have entirely forgotten about your auction listing. That’s why it’s important for you set a goal for how long it takes to respond to customer questions, such as within an hour during regular business hours, and to stick to that goal whenever possible.
Of course unless you’re a large organization with round-the-clock support reps on hand, it’s impossible to respond to customers immediately during the full 24 hours a day that your listings are active. Our ezSupport for eBay tool provides auto-response messaging that can be helpful, but more about that later.
Communicate Positively We all like to be dealt with in a friendly and polite manner. Even if we have a problem that can’t be fixed, we’re much more likely to deal with a seller again if the seller was friendly in their response. Simple courtesy costs nothing, and it goes a long way towards building a long-lasting relationship, so always approach customer communications with a positive attitude. But it’s not enough to simply have a positive attitude, you also must communicate your positive attitude in your responses to customers.
To illustrate my point about communicating positively, I once asked a seller whether a shirt he was selling came in any other colors. The seller’s curt response was, and I quote: “green”.
It’s certainly possible that the seller typed the word “green” in great good humor and with a smile on his face, but if so that positive attitude wasn’t conveyed. A better response would’ve been something like: “Hi, thanks for your interest. The shirt also comes in green. Have a great day.”
When replying to a customer’s question try to think from their perspective. How will this response sound when the customer reads it without hearing your voice or seeing your facial expressions? If your message doesn’t sound cheerful without adding vocal inflections, then you need to rewrite it. A lot of the work here can be eliminated by maintaining templates of canned responses for typical questions. That way you can automatically include positive messaging and only need to customize the details. Our ezSupport for eBay tool provides this canned response feature, but again, more about that later.
Handle Complaints Skillfully No one likes hearing customer complaints, and it’s easy to adopt the attitude that you can’t please all the people all the time. But how understanding would you be if a seller handled your complaint with that attitude?
A few months ago I did an entire workshop on how to deal with disgruntled customers. The method I described then is also based on my Golden Rule of treating customers the way you would like to be treated, so here’s a brief review of my process for managing customer complaints.
Respond Immediately: I spoke about replying ASAP above, and this is especially important when dealing with customer complaints. Stay Calm and Listen: It’s impossible to come out a winner in an argument with a customer, so it’s best to just calming listen to a customer’s complaint. When the customer realizes that you’re listening he/she will eventually cool down and you’ll then be able to handle the issue constructively. Resolve the Problem ASAP: Unless you want to make the customer even angrier and deal with an escalation of the issue, do whatever you need to handle the problem pronto. Keep in Contact: If the problem can’t be resolved quickly, remember to keep in contact with the customer until a resolution is in place. Learn: The more you learn from each dissatisfied customer the more you’ll be able to improve your business practices, and the fewer dissatisfied customers you’ll need to deal with in the future.
Keep Your Promises Is there anything more exasperating in a business transaction than when a merchant promises you something but doesn’t deliver? Like a cable guy (feel free to substitute phone guy, plumber, electrician or anyone else you’ve dealt with recently) who says he’ll be there between 10:00am and noon. Yeah, right. You know what it feels like to sit there waiting for hours on end, so don’t be the cable guy.
Your reliability as a seller is absolutely crucial for developing positive relationships with your customers. If you say you’ll ship in two business days, don’t plan to ship in two business days, ship in two business days. So don’t make any promises to customers unless you’re sure you will keep them, because nothing annoys customers more than a broken promise.
Be Honest Everybody makes mistakes. Emails get deleted. Things fall through the cracks. Packages get lost. If you’ve made a mistake and a transaction has gone awry, the best policy is to simply fess up and provide the best possible option for moving forward. Generally customers understand when mistakes happen, and they’ll appreciate your integrity if you give them an honest explanation. This is where the Golden Rule can work in reverse, so that a customer can understand being in your shoes too.
Go the Extra Mile Doesn’t it make you feel special when someone goes even a little bit out of their way to help you? I recently attended a speech by the CEO of Zappos.com, a company renowned for top-notch customer support. Zappos sells shoes online, but as a joke a friend of the CEO called Zappos’ support line and tried to order a pizza. Instead of hanging up on the crank call, the Zappos rep actually did a quick online search for pizza delivery places in the caller’s neighborhood, then gave the guy a list of numbers to call.
I’m not suggesting that you kill yourself to please every crank caller, but if there’s something you can reasonably do to help out a customer or potential customer, do it. Who knows how it might benefit you down the line? If I’d called Zappos by mistake when trying to order a pizza and they’d gotten delivery numbers for me, I know where my next pair of shoes would be coming from.
Give Customers the Benefit of the Doubt A common mistake for support reps is to try to prove to a customer that they’re wrong. It’s easy to get defensive when customers get testy, and sometimes the customer is wrong, but have you ever enjoyed having someone point your mistakes out to you? Simply explaining the issue and instructing the customer on the correct way to move forward is enough. You should never get annoyed when a customer is confused by something. It’s not an excuse to say that the customer “just doesn’t understand”. It’s you’re job to make sure customers are fully informed.
My Golden Rule of customer support can help you build more positive relationships with your customers. However, support tools are also necessary for you to implement these strategies efficiently and to provide valuable customer support in general. Effective customer support requires giving customers access to as much information as possible, responding to customer questions and issues in a timely manner, and keeping customer purchasing and support information organized and accessible for you and your staff.
Hosted Support offers ezSupport for eBay, which can help you get a handle on buyer email and make it convenient for your customers to get answers. In addition to providing auto-response messaging for buyer questions, ezSupport for eBay offers its Advanced FAQs module which allows your customers to find answers to their questions directly from your auction listings, rather than sending a question to you from the “Ask Seller a Question” form.
eBay sellers using ezSupport for eBay report the following benefits: - Bulk of customer questions answered with self-service Advanced FAQs - Automatic responses to questions submitted via the “Ask Seller a Question” form - Automatic retention of all customer communications, stored indefinitely in ezSupport’s Contact Manager - 25% increase in listings and revenue due to time savings
Over 3000 eBay sellers use ezSupport for eBay, including top sellers like Eforcity. Case studies detailing how these eBay sellers are using ezSupport for eBay are available in the Case Studies section of our website, http://www.hostedsupport.com.
By using these tips and tools for improving and automating customer support, you’ll be able to work “smarter” rather than just working harder. You’ll get better Feedback scores, more repeat buyers, and higher revenue for your business!
There's some great information here folks! We'd love to hear from you - please let us know if you have any questions or comments on the material posted.
Hello --- Thank you for the great advice. About a month ago (prior to having an ebay powerseller account manager) we had a situation with a customer who left approximately 70 negative feedback comments on our account. We had done everything in our power to rectify the situation and turn it into a positive shopping experience. Unfortunately nothing seemed to help. We eventually had to block her from doing business with our company. At what point will eBay assist a seller with a difficult customer? Thank you
Ouch! Sorry to hear about the painful experience sizzix_outlet. I know eBay has procedures in place to deal with buyers who are providing inaccurate or fraudulent Feedback, but I'm not sure of the specifics. This would be a good issue to address to an eBay account manager as you may be able to get the buyer's Feedback removed.
How do I go about getting this ezSupport for use with eBay? I'm only in the office Mon-Fri and would like to be able to put in an auto-message so my customer knows that I won't get to there questions till Monday?
Luckily, the feedback has been removed (this week) as it turns out the buyer's account has been terminated. At the time, we did not have an account manager and did not know if/when eBay would get involved. While looking at this buyers feedback, she had quite a few issues with buyers and sellers alike, many of which indicated that they had reported her. We just didn't know how long it took before eBay gets involved.
We are interested in the Ask a Seller a question using Skype. We have set up the skype account, is there a way to update all of our listings in bulk, or do we have to do this one at a time? (we use a third party checkout system and inventory manager)
That's great to hear sizzix_outlet. One thing to remember about unruly customers is that if you're having a bad experience with them, it's likely that many others will have had the same problem. And hopefully the buyer's reputation will speak for itself.
Currently ezSupport for eBay only auto responds to questions via My Messages and POP email sizzix_outlet. Although ezSupport for eBay's Searchable FAQs module can add an FAQ knowledgebase to the Ask Seller a Question for so many answers can be found before buyers have to submit a question.
Just a note: In regards to the Skype set up. The help page tells you to go to Notification Preferences, when the Skype setting is actually located under Site Preferences.
We’re almost at the end of the workshop, so as our way of saying thanks for attending, we’re giving away ezSupport for eBay to the next 500 eBay sellers who sign up. No tricks. No gimmicks. No hidden charges. It’s 100% free.
Subscribe to this topic via RSS Learn more about RSS
Information Central
Welcome to The Workshop Board!
This board is home to eBay Workshops hosted by the eBay Certified Provider Team. Visit the eBay Workshop Calendar for the list of current workshops and topics.
eBay Certified Providers have the tools, services, expertise and experience needed to help develop and grow your eBay business.
eBay Certified Providers are 3rd party companies with extensive expertise on the topic of their workshop. They are independent companies qualified by eBay to have demonstrated experience and expertise in growing eBay seller businesses.
New to eBay? Visit eBay Learning Essentials and learn how to get started on eBay from creating an account to listing your first item.
Already selling on eBay? Take your business on eBay to the next level with eBay Growth Strategies.
Workshops
Learn more about RSS
Must use Buy It Now and PayPal.
)
)
