Answer Your Email and Your Phone

There is no such thing as seamless ecommerce. Delivery trucks break down, orders get misplaced, computers crash, half the shipping department can be out with the flu. These problems are part of life, no matter how efficiently you run your business. Customers waiting for their orders want to know why their merchandise hasn't arrived on schedule, just as you would if you were in their shoes. They are going to call or email and ask what's going on. Your response or lack of response to those queries can easily determine whether or not the people sending them are going to remain your customers, and since it's almost always less expensive to hang on to customers you already have than to find new ones, you had better answer those inquiries as rapidly and honestly as you possibly can.

Email is probably the most common way for customers to ask about online orders they have placed. You must answer customer email as rapidly as possible, even if you stay late every night or authorize massive overtime to do it. Many of the horror stories that abounded during the first heavy ecommerce Christmas seasons in 1999 and 2000 had to do with lack of response to customer inquiries about misplaced or late orders. Many companies that had gone into the ecommerce business in 1998 or 1999 seemed to forget (or may never have known) that money would not roll in effortlessly through their Web sites, and that no matter how many times they repeated the mantra, "The Internet changes everything," ecommerce really didn't change anything except the way sales information is delivered to customers and the way that customers send orders to vendors. Freeways and expressways were still subject to traffic jams that made delivery trucks run late, and defective components were still a major annoyance to vendors and customers alike. And what changed least was human nature. Customers who didn't get deliveries on time or who got items delivered that didn't work or were damaged during shipping were as angry in the Internet era as they were back when goods were delivered by sailing ships and ox carts.

The only real difference between the Internet age and the pre-online world of postal mail order is that today's online customers expect to get answers to inquiries in hours, not in days or weeks.

But more insidious than email is the telephone. Email inquiries have at least some time slack to them. If a stack of them comes in all at once, and delays in responding to them are kept to eight hours or less, most customers will still be happy. In addition, with email, it is possible to come up with stock phrases that can be pasted into replies ("We're experiencing some delays because of a power outage to our warehouse that lasted from Monday evening through Thursday morning."). A human "Please bear with us" plea and a (true) explanation of (temporary) difficulties you face can go a long way toward mollifying upset customers if phrased correctly. Phone calls demand an entire different level of response speed. Modern humans don't like to be put on hold for more than a few minutes, and we don't like being forced to wade through voice mail menus. When we're calling to see why we haven't received our orders or why the merchandise we received didn't work, we are in no mood to wait. We want answers, and we want them now. When we hear, "If you know your party's extension, you may dial it at any time," we tend to curse under our breaths. It is not our job, we figure, to memorize your phone system. We have a problem, and we want a live human to pick up the phone and take care of it.

If you buy an item from an in-person vendor, you have the option of taking it back to the store if it doesn't work right. If there is a line at the customer service counter, you can see how long that line is and watch it inch along. There is a feeling of progress. Waiting on the telephone hold does not provide this kind of visual contact. There is no chance to talk to the person in front of or behind you in line. There is nothing to look at but a lonely telephone. This is not good service. You will not stand for it more than once if any other company, online or not, provides the same goods or services, and neither will your customers, with one situational exception: If your Web site has made it clear, right from the start, that your business is tiny, run by only a few people, you can probably get away with taking messages and returning calls as long as you make those callbacks promptly, and your "We're not here" message has an actual name on it, along the lines of, "Hi, this is Frank at (company name). Please leave a message and we'll call you back within (number of hours)." A large business cannot get away with this. Customers will, justifiably, mutter, "With all their money, they can't afford to have anyone answer the phone?"

Too many Internet entrepreneurs fail to factor in the cost of providing rapid email and telephone customer service, which can be a substantial expense at all times, and can hit alarming peaks if you run into a series of product defects or delivery problems. You must be prepared to move a significant percentage of your personnel to customer service, almost immediately, if you experience a higher number of complaints than usual. When your only contact with your customers is through the Internet or by phone, you must make those contacts as pleasant as possible if you are going to build a long-term Internet business.