Supporting Your E-Commerce Website's Customer Service Staff

By DoItYourself.com Staff

Your Commerce Server's base administrative tools may or may not be sufficient to support your customer service organization. The requirements of your support staff should be an important part of your site's functional specification and should reflect the types of tasks that they will be performing.

Consider the following:

• Will support staff need to modify orders? Will they need to be able to bypass the usual rules for calculating prices, shipping, taxes and so forth? You may need to develop a separate Commerce Server pipeline for orders submitted by customer service to enable them to sell items at a lower price, to lower or eliminate shipping charges, etc.
• Will the support staff need to search for orders in the system? The likely answer is yes, and you'll need to find out what information they will have to search with. They may be searching for a customer name, a phone number, an order number or even just a billing zip code or credit card number. Plan for an interface that offers as much flexibility as possible.
• Your staff may have to help less experienced customers complete tasks that are normally done through your self-service offerings. Make sure that the support staff can modify a customer's address information, credit card numbers and other stored information.

Find out what other tasks your support staff expects to accomplish on a regular basis. Make sure your site's functional specification provides them with the necessary tools and interfaces to accomplish these tasks quickly as possible, so that they can efficiently help as many customers as possible.

The following Basic Beliefs about customers in general may come in handy for your support staff to understand the magnitude of their responsibility:

• Customers are reasonable.
• Customers are normally genuine and understand related problems or limitations.
• Every customer is unique and craves for personal importance.
• All customers are human beings.
• Treat customers the way you would like to be treated.
• Understand or feel the pain of customer like a doctor.
• Customers have no such thing as minor problems.
• Most of the customers would like to take adequate precautions if communicated in time.
• Customers may accept mistakes or limitations but not disrespectful behavior, negative or negligent attitude, or repeated mistakes or problems.

The Advantages of Giving Attention

Giving attention in small cubicles to your online customers is like sowing the seeds of acorns on fertile land. Both will return benefits in manifold. Good customer support practices and devices built into your e-commerce site or Internet store will result in reputation of your Internet store as well as return customers.

© Doityourself.com 2006