In many aspects of business, the best strategy for entrepreneurs is to mimic large companies. Unfortunately, following the leader is often too expensive and requires too much time and energy. With one bad decision, you could watch your company collapse. For example, if you follow the customer service examples of the top 100 websites, you'd likely lose your loyal customers.
To keep your online business afloat without learning by making mistakes, we suggest that you look at the bad habits of large companies and do the opposite. The following five bad habits frustrate and annoy customers, and if you do the opposite, you will build a dynamic and efficient customer support service.
No Live Chat
Guilty Parties: Amazon, eBay and Best Buy
One of the best ways to create a personal connection between your business and customers is live chat support. Live chat support software gives you the chance to see where your visitors spend the most time on your site and to invite them to ask questions directly. However, few large companies offer this service. While helpdesk software is not necessary for many websites, retail sites could profit by guiding customers to specific products. If you are on Amazon and have questions about two Blu-ray players they sell, don't count on a support representative to offer help. If you sell a product or service, make sure to offer excellent online customer support through live chat.
The Customer Is Always Right
Guilty Parties: Amazon, eBay and Wikipedia
Once upon a time, customer service meant doing anything in your power to keep customers happy. While that's not a bad thing, we live in a different world now. Sometimes, you shouldn't bend over backwards to make the customer happy. If you've already built a strong live chat support system and a customer still buys the wrong product, you should think hard about providing refunds. On the other end of the spectrum, some online retailers are able to stay profitable by taking every return. Oddly, this extends beyond retail, though. Have you ever noticed those red links on Wikipedia? If you click the Discussion tab, you'll see why the article is missing. Oftentimes, someone removed the article, claiming that the subject isn't important enough to justify web space. The point here is to monitor every transaction and suggestion closely. Sometimes, people are mean on the internet and try to rip you off.
One Size Fits All
Guilty Parties: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube
FAQs are a great way to provide information without repeating yourself. If you only offer FAQs, though, you're doing a major disservice to your visitors. FAQ-only support becomes an issue when they don't answer customers' questions. If you have a question about uploading videos on YouTube and the answer is confusing or does not fit your situation, you have three choices: Keep searching for an answer that fits, send an email to the automated support service or leave the site. With your small business, customers are likely to pick the last option. Large companies get away with FAQ-only support because they have enough users for people to rely on the community for answers. As a small business, you should never rely on your customers to provide support for each other.
Complicated Help and Support Pages
Guilty Parties: Google and Microsoft
The last time I tried to find answers on Microsoft's website, I got lost in layers upon layers of FAQs guides. When I finally found what I was looking for, I had been logged out of Microsoft's website and had to start all over. However, for as frustrating as my experience with Microsoft's help and support pages was, I would rather be locked in a small room with poisonous spiders than attempt to find support on any of Google's pages. Never punish your website's visitors for needing help. When building your support site, have your oldest-living relative test the site by finding several key problem areas. If the least tech-savvy person you know cannot find help, your support site is too complicated. Simple help and support software pays for itself in brand loyalty and customer satisfaction.
Community Reliance
Guilty Parties: Wikipedia, Blogspot and WordPress
Some of the largest internet companies don't need a support structure. They allow the community of users to help each other, and with the millions of loyal users, it works for them. It will not work for you. You cannot build a forum on your website and call it good. Until you become a huge, international company with millions of customers, you must take personal responsibility for your products or services. When you rely on users to help each other, you tell your customers that you don't care if your product works or not.
If you do the opposite of these five habits, your small business' support structure will help build brand loyalty, establish a personal touch with your customers and prove that you stand behind your products.
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