Little soldiers behind the iron walls

Good customer service is a prerequisite for any ecommerce website that wants to be successful. It strengthens customer loyalty and retention in the future; it basically keeps them from wandering off to your competitors and purchasing from them. It’s a digital spin on positive word of mouth! If a customer has a bad experience shopping with a site, they have the enormous forum of the digital world in which to voice their annoyance and discontent. Bad news travels fast online and a poor customer experience can result in your company being lambasted in a very public forum. Think how well your company can do with a strong SEO strategy and where it can land in the search results; now imagine that a bad customer review lands up on the rankings above or below your result. Online shoppers make up their minds very quickly and they are just looking for a reason not to buy your products.

I’ve had a couple of very bad experiences online recently. Both of these experiences were down to appalling customer service, yet these companies were very different: one big, one small. The common thing tying both experiences together – other than the horrendous customer service – was the fact that both companies hid behind the comfort and detachment of their websites. In doing so, they remained separate from the issue and could ignore it for a very long time.

It started off simply enough, as most stories do. I’d placed an online order with a small company. The journey was smooth enough and the checkout process was relatively painless; I got through the whole process in about 10 minutes – I’d been reading some customer reviews and lost track of the time. I should have been suspicious when I didn’t get an automated email confirming my purchase right away, but hindsight is a blessing and a curse. The lines were silent and I didn’t receive the items I ordered, so I called the company to chase it up. After a week still no order. I called them again.

This time was a different story. They told me that they had ordered the wrong products and couldn’t fulfil the order. I reordered and still nothing. By this point, the vein in my head was probably the size of a football; I’d started to look like Stressed Eric on a particularly bad day. When I finally got through again, they told me that they had forgotten and that they took full responsibility.

‘Okay,’ I thought.

My last nerve was understandably raw. After another wrangle, they finally admitted that it was still kicking  around their offices. Never again.

I won’t name the company here because it wouldn’t serve any purpose other than to start flinging mud around. The point is this, some companies have grown so comfortable in the detachment of the online community that they have completely lost sight of the basics of a good shopping experience: customer service. So many businesses these days hide behind their websites and telephones to avoid having to face up to the fact that they have failed their customers. It’s not good enough.

If a customer has a bad experience on your site, they are almost certain to blog about it, tweet about it or circulate the information online. They certainly won’t recommend you to anyone else. They’ll most likely badmouth you to all of their friends, family and colleagues; by the end of it, they will deter a fair few people from ordering with you.

Good customer service costs nothing; bad customer service can cost you everything.

Paul