Preparing your Customer Support e-infrastructure for the Holiday Season
Time to Rock
Before you know it, the 2008 holiday season will be here with all its charm, upswing euphoria and the contagious gala mood. As an online entrepreneur for whom the holiday season might be a pivotal business window of opportunity, the moment to plan has finally arrived. Here are five things you should consider implementing right away not only to provide top-flight customer service to your existing customers who will return to you this year for more but also for your new customers who are all set to generate new sales for you.
Call your web hosting company to check your bandwidth allocation…
Based on your usage and site access patterns, your web hosting company and you should be able to predict the amount of bandwidth your web site will need to remain smoothly operational. Ask your web hosting company to estimate this for you and make advance arrangements. After all “Bandwidth Exceeded” is the last message you want your customers and site visitors to confront when they land on your web site.
Appoint additional chat operators…
So that your customers don't have to wait in line for too long, consider appointing additional chat operators right away and begin training them very quickly. They should be well-versed with your product or service line, policies, procedures and chat fundamentals before Thanksgiving. If there are budget constraints, consider hiring stay-at-home Moms part-time who can work out of their homes. They can be an excellent source of holiday help. A part-time chat operator is better than no chat operator at all. If you haven't signed up for live chat services already, it is perhaps time to do so. Live chat drums up sales multifold. There is plenty of research on this subject and our editors can help you easily access it.
Streamline Telephone Support
According to a recently published study by Comscore Networks USA, 90 percent of consumers who conducted an Internet search and
made a purchase, completed their transaction offline. Only 10 percent of those surveyed made their purchase online. What does this tell us? It indicates that consumers are visiting your site to conduct the research, chatting with your chat operators for more information and gaining product knowledge but actually calling you on the telephone when it is time to give you their Visa or MasterCard number. SSL security certificates not withstanding, customers still don't seem to be comfortable making online purchases and continue to turn to Ma Bell to reach out and touch you. Therefore: please display a phone number on your home page, preferably toll free. Write to us for inbound toll free service for as low as 2.4 cents a minute and we will have you set up with 800 toll free service in and from the US in three hours. By the way, 3000 consumers participated in this survey so the survey sample wasn't exactly chicken feed.
Uplift your home page graphics…
In order to make an upswing impression on your site visitors, start thinking about how you can reposition your home page with holiday visuals and eye-catching holiday graphics. Hire a reputed graphics designer to hang the bells and whistles on your home page Christmas tree. The brick and mortar stores have been doing this for hundreds of years.
Build a comprehensive FAQ section…
Your Frequently Asked Questions page is one link many of your customers and prospects will click this holiday season to learn more about your products and your company. Add a new link on your home page called FAQs or upgrade your existing FAQs in order to capture the entire picture and project a more complete and comprehensive image.
We all have an innate tendency to procrastinate but it is a good idea to make an exception once in a while. After all, it is good for business! |
