Description: Don’t lose a sale due to slow responses to buyer questions. ezSupport for eBay, by Hosted Support, lets sellers create a knowledge base to be used either as a FAQ (buyers can search for and find their own answers) or if they email sellers directly, ezSupport for eBay will automatically respond to the buyer email based on information the seller has already supplied.
Now you can add ezSupport for eBay quickly and easily to your eBay account with the release of new selling applications for Selling Manager Applications.
A note 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.
The workshop is open! Take advantage of this great opportunity to ask the Hosted Support team questions on how their Email and FAQs solution will help you save time answering buyer emails or completely reduce the amount of buyer emails you receive on eBay.
If you are a current subscriber to ezSupport for eBay (by Hosted Support) or a seller interested in ezSupport for eBay, this is the workshop for you!
Workshops are interactive, so please feel free to ask your questions that directly relate to this topic. We will answer all questions!
Hello everyone! I’m Jerad Schempp, CEO of Hosted Support, an eBay Certified Solution Provider. I’m glad you could make it to the workshop today, and I hope you have plenty of questions and comments for me.
Hosted Support has been providing customer support solutions since 2003 and has an eBay Compatible Application called ezSupport for eBay that’s built specifically to address the customer support needs of eBay sellers. I’m always excited to share our experience and knowledge regarding customer support issues, especially about how excellent customer support can help sellers increase sales and profits.
And now I’m super excited because ezSupport is available through eBay’s Selling Manager Applications, so you can subscribe for and access your ezSupport account directly within your eBay account.
Having ezSupport integrated within eBay’s Selling Manager means you no longer need to go to a separate website to login to ezSupport -- that’s one less password you need to remember. With Selling Manager Applications, your complete ezSupport account and customer communications are available right in eBay under the My eBay tab. Isn’t it amazing that eBay has managed to squeeze all that functionality under one small tab?
I’ll have more information about Selling Manager Applications in a moment, but first let’s go over a few important tips for how you can keep buyers from wiggling off your sales hook when they’re interested in your item but have a question before they buy.
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 best way to satisfy customers is to provide them with the information they need as quickly and easily as possible. So let’s go over a couple ways you can do this and how ezSupport can help you.
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 you know how your customers will feel if they can’t find the information they need on your item listings. So when you’re designing your 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.
Unfortunately, no matter how well-designed and information-packed your listing descriptions are, let’s face it, many buyers just won’t read through a description carefully. How often have you gotten questions from buyers when the answers were right there in your listing description? Frustrating, isn’t it? But that’s where FAQs can really help you out.
A thorough list of FAQs added to all your item listings can act as your first line of defense for handling customer questions. 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 Smart FAQs are an option for sellers who are dealing with a small number of listings.
But if you’re spending too much valuable time replying to customer questions, you should use ezSupport’s Advanced FAQs. ezSupport’s Advanced FAQs can answer customer questions for you upfront, so you can substantially reduce the number of question you have to answer manually.
What makes ezSupport’s Advanced FAQs so effective is that they are searchable. Customers can simply enter questions into ezSupport’s FAQ search engine and get instant answers, without needing to browse through a laundry list of FAQs.
Here’s how ezSupport’s Advanced FAQs work. As far as setup goes, you simply add your FAQs into your ezSupport account. ezSupport is completely web-based, and is designed so you can quickly enter question/answer pairs or import FAQs from a file. You can categorize FAQs however you want and can even have sub-categories if necessary. There’s no limit to the number of FAQs you can have, and of course you can add, edit and delete your ezSupport FAQs at any time.
As for your customers, when customers have questions about your listings, they click the “Ask a Question” link as usual. They are then directed to your FAQ page, where they can submit natural-language questions or browse your custom categories to find their answers. If the answer to a question isn’t available, customers are then directed to the “Ask a Question” form to submit their question.
Again, searchability is the key to getting the most out of your FAQs. The same customers who don’t bother reading your listing descriptions also won’t bother browsing through a list of FAQs. They want to do a quick and easy search, and that’s what ezSupport’s Advanced FAQs provide.
ezSupport has other handy features too, like its FAQ search reports that allow you to see exactly what searches customers are performing. When you can see what customers are searching for, you can add that crucial information to your next listings.
Make sense to have searchable FAQs? You bet it does. And sellers using ezSupport tell us that up to 80% of their customer questions end up being answered by their searchable FAQs knowledgebase. How much time do you think that will save you? But more importantly, when customers find answers to their questions immediately, they’re much more likely to bid or buy immediately, and that means business!
Of course even with self-serve, searchable FAQs covering the majority of questions, customers will still manage to come up with questions you haven’t included in your FAQs. There are also sellers who would just rather respond to customer inquiries instead of posting FAQs in order to establish contact with customers. So managing and responding to customer questions remains an important issue. In any event, when you reply to customer questions, the key to satisfaction and closing the deal is speed.
Do you like waiting hours or even days for a response when you submit a question to a seller or an ecommerce website? Certainly 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 item listing.
That’s why it’s important for you to respond to customer questions ASAP, and ezSupport can help you there as well. With features like canned responses and automatic folder routing by message type, ezSupport provides the tools you need to reply to questions rapidly.
ezSupport’s auto-response messaging system works very simply. It’s based on the same FAQ knowledgebase used for searchable Advanced FAQs. If you set your ezSupport account to auto-respond, when customers submit questions to you via the “Ask a Question” form, ezSupport will analyze the question to find any matching words in your FAQs. If ezSupport doesn’t find any matching answers in your FAQ knowledgebase, then the question will go to your inbox for manual handling. However, if a matching answer is found, within seconds, ezSupport will automatically respond to your customer with the matching answer. And if the customer is not satisfied by the auto-response they are then directed to forward the question to you for manual handling. How cool is that?
In addition to providing easy access to information and responding to customer questions as quickly as possible, it’s also important to maintain a contact record for each of your customers that includes all the contact information you can gather as well as communication history. Knowing what you and your customer said to each other last week, last month, or last year will allow you to avoid confusing he-said, she-said situations and more importantly will help you build a rapport with your customers.
ezSupport’s Contact Manager automatically creates a contact record for each eBay buyer ID that sends you a message. And once a buyer contact record is created, ezSupport will automatically attach new messages and your replies to the buyer’s record. This will allow you to have quick access to your correspondence history with each buyer, and that’s valuable information!
Now eBay’s Selling Manager Applications makes accessing all of ezSupport’s tools and functionality ez-er than ever. Taking advantage of Selling Manager Applications is easy too. You just need to be subscribed to eBay’s Selling Manager or Selling Manager Pro, and now that Selling Manager is free there’s no reason not to use it. All Selling Manger users have a new “Applications” tab on their My eBay page. Under the “Applications” tab you can review all the helpful applications that have been integrated with Selling Manager, you can subscribe for applications, and you can use your subscribed applications like ezSupport on a daily basis. See why I’m so excited!
Hi jewlryagain. ezSupport for eBay is just $19.95/month/support rep. You can have as many support reps with individual access to your account as you wish.
I’m also excited because Hosted Support has several new improvements in store that we’ll be adding to ezSupport over the next few months. The one I’m most excited about is our help desk “gadget” that will allow sellers to embed their searchable Advanced FAQs help desk within their listing descriptions or eBay store. This will allow customers to search your FAQs directly on your listing or store pages without even having to click the “Ask a Question” link. You’ll be able to display your FAQs help desk on your pages wherever you can enter a line of code. Wow!
ezSupport for eBay has been available for approximately three years, and the Selling Manager Applications platform is now available to all sellers in the U.S. who are subscribed to Selling Manager or Selling Manager Pro.
Over 3000 eBay sellers are using ezSupport for eBay. eBay sellers using ezSupport for eBay report the following benefits: - Bulk of customer questions answered with searchable Advanced FAQs - Automatic responses to questions submitted via the “Ask a Question” form - Customer messages automatically stored indefinitely in ezSupport’s Contact Manager - 25% increase in listings and revenue due to time savings
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