Incorporating Customer Self-Service in E-Commerce Websites

By DoItYourself.com Staff

Creating an effective customer self-service system can help your company save money by reducing the number of customer service representatives needed to staff a customer service line, and can greatly improve your customers' overall experience and satisfaction with your site. The vast majority of Internet shoppers prefer to help themselves - that's why they choose to shop over the Internet. And that is why most of the e-commerce sites, Internet stores and retail selling sites flock together in extending better and smooth customer self-service in their sites.

Examine the areas of your site that are good targets for customer self-service. Some examples include:

• Checking the status of an order that has been placed.
• Making changes to a customer's profile, password, username, e-mail address, preferred addresses, methods of payment and so forth.
• Providing product-support information such as how to operate or make adjustments to a product.
• Downloading updates, such as new device drivers or product manuals.
• Managing participation in e-mail newsletters, "wish lists" and the like.
• Accepting customer complaints and comments.
• Allowing customers to modify an order they have placed, or canceling all or part of an order that has not yet been shipped.

Make sure your site implements as many of these self-service features as possible while web designing. Your "live" support staff should be available to handle the most difficult cases and can mean the difference between a customer's satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Make sure that these employees aren't tied up with mundane, day-to-day issues like password or e-mail address changes that customers can just as easily perform themselves.

Any information that you collect from a customer is bound to change eventually. If you are going to collect and save any customer, make sure to provide some way for the customers to update that information on their own.

In an effort to reduce clicks and information overload, a self-service area is a good place to gather more information and offer more options than you may be presenting in other areas of your site. For example, in the interests of simplicity, your checkout process may only allow customers to provide the same address for shipping and billing. In your self-service "customer profile" section, however, you can allow customers to maintain a more complex "address book" and multiple forms of payment. The next time they check out, they can select this information rather than typing it into the checkout, thus saving them time.

Make sure to take the time to design your customers' self-service experience as carefully as you designed your browsing and checkout processes. Customers should feel welcomed by the self-service functionality, they should be able to quickly begin the self-service task that they came to complete, and they should feel that additional "live" help is only a phone call away, particularly for service issues like order information or complaints.

If you create a self-service area to handle complaints, make sure that the customer receives immediate feedback indicating that the information has been accepted, and then provide a definite timeline for a reply, such as 48 hours, 5 days, etc. Repeat this information in an automated follow-up e-mail so the customer will know you are working on their problem. Too often, online complaint-handling systems drop customers' comments into a low-priority queue, saving the customer service department's time for complaints being called in. This process defeats the entire purpose of online self-service, however, which is to encourage customers to use the site rather than the phone. Set rules and guidelines about how customer online complaints will be handled and stick with them.

Your self-service area can also include "live" online support. This method of customer service has become popular on high-volume web sites and can result in significant savings on incoming phone charges to a toll-free number. In most implementations, customers submit a question, which is immediately submitted to a live operator's queue. A browser window remains open and the live operator's response appears in that window as soon as the query has been handled. If necessary, the operator can launch a live chat window to further interact with the customer and gather additional information. Cyber-Rep.com is a good example of a company that offers customer service outsourcing and innovative online service technologies.

No mater what kind of self-service offerings your site provides, make sure that they are effective. Nothing is more frustrating for customers who want to help themselves than to discover that your site won't let them do what they want. Checking their order status, for example, isn't very useful if you don't provide a tracking number so customers can see when their package is due to be delivered. It's good practice to be able to tell a customer that a product is backordered, but it's even better to be able to tell them when you expect to receive more of the product. Make sure that your self-service offering is complete and that it provides the information and results that customers will expect when they sign on.

Make sure that your self-service offerings are in line with your company's customer service philosophy. This philosophy will dictate, for example, how easily customers can get to a live customer support representative.

© Doityourself.com 2006