Customer Support Devices for E-Commerce Websites

By DoItYourself.com Staff

Even though a well-thought-out customer self-service environment is created in your e-commerce site or Internet store, customers do need specific help in certain contingency and peculiar situations. A very few online shoppers will not trust the pop-ups and assurances displayed by the software and pre written script. They want to hear a human voice or a chat phrase to be convinced. They may even have a word of complaint to make. Remember, customers have no "minor" problems, so you can't afford to neglect some as "minor" complaints. To handle all of these issues, market giants incorporate Customer Support devices like online support, messenger support and Help desk elements.

The Options

Sometimes self service is not enough. Customers may need assistance from someone in your company, or at least an agent of your company, to handle their service issue.

Your company's customer service philosophy dictates the different types of customer support that you provide and the ease with which customers can find your means of support. For example, you may prominently display an e-mail address to which customers can send support requests, but require more digging to locate a phone number they can call. Or, your company may place its customer service phone number on every page of the website, thus encouraging customers to call in.

Your company may also opt to use newer forms of live customer support, such as online chat and instant messaging services designed for customer support and service. In this case, you need to provide the necessary integration between the site and your customer support technologies.

Carefully define what tasks your customer service representatives can handle. Provide them with the technological support necessary to enable them to handle these tasks. If your company is outsourcing its customer service line, a common practice in the e-commerce industry, then you need to provide technological support to those representatives, who may not be located at your facility.

Enabling Customer Support Technologies

A variety of technologies are available to connect customers to customer service representatives. If your company chooses to roll its own support infrastructure, you will need to look at some of the following technologies to implement effective solutions. Your company may also choose to use third-party technologies to provide online support such as the variety of call-me-now and online service technologies offered by professional customer support items.

Pros and Cons of Exchange Server

Exchange Server represents Microsoft's most robust set of technologies for personal interaction. Exchange Server allows you to automate the handling of incoming e-mail through server-side scripting. Exchange Server also supports robust chat technology, including the ability to host moderated chat rooms, which can be a form of online customer service chat. Exchange also offers instant messaging through the MSN Messenger IM client. With the exception of e-mail, none of these technologies are specifically designed to support a customer service environment, so you'll have to make tradeoffs in functionality. However, if you already have Exchange Server in your environment, these technologies can represent a way to interact with your customers until more robust, service-specific technologies can be deployed.

Exchange Server also supports Internet newsgroups. Creating customer support newsgroups and assigning employees to monitor and respond to them can often help several customers at once.

Pros and Cons of Internet Information Server IIS supports many of the same technologies as Exchange Server, albeit on a smaller scale. IIS's NNTP service allows you to host newsgroups, although IIS offers less control over the newsgroups and requires more ongoing maintenance than news groups that are hosted by Exchange Server. Likewise, IIS allows you to host an SMTP mail site, but this functionality is primarily intended for outgoing mail, at the time of this writing, rather than for handling incoming mail from customers. Although this is useful for sending automated replies, it isn't useful for allowing customer interaction with customer service representatives.

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