Five Tried and Tested Tools to Improve Your Online Customer Service

By David Eedle |

I suspect it’s not unreasonable to suggest that everyone in the world has a story about poor customer service. And thankfully today’s technologies are improving the opportunities for both sides of the equation to take action.

I was standing in the queue at our local bank yesterday. Let’s relive my Tweets (sent from my iPhone using the Tweetie app), I’d been there around for about five or six minutes, then finally boredom ensued and I hauled my phone out:

In big queue at #nab branch Brighton. Waiting ages. 3 tellers, until one grabs bag and leaves. Now 2 tellers.1:02 PM Aug 3rd from Tweetie

Why in a service business like #nab when everyone uses lunch to do banking, do #nab let staff have lunch breaks at 1pm1:04 PM Aug 3rd from Tweetie

2 #nab tellers serving same 2 customers for 10 minutes now. 2 people ahead of me given up and left queue already.1:09 PM Aug 3rd from Tweetie

Guy ahead of me in #nab queue just bailed, abused staff and left. Don’t blame him. Always awfully slow at Brighton branch.1:10 PM Aug 3rd from Tweetie

Miracle. Now being served at #nab Brighton. 17 minute wait. Would have been much longer but for the people ahead of me who gave up and left.1:14 PM Aug 3rd from Tweetie

I’m not quite so strident as the Tweeter who really does proclaim to hate banks though.

Here in Melbourne one of the most talked about aspects of everyday life is our public transport system. We alternately loath and love it – Melbourne has one of the largest tram networks of any city in the world and they are a terrific way to move around, all providing there’s a tram heading the way you want at the time you need. But the most public stoushes occur over our trains. I’ll spare you the politics that have resulted in a combination of long term neglect and record patronage increases colliding big time in recent months, of course almost always on days of record temperatures. Nothing more amusing than squeezing on a train at rush hour in 45 degree heat then to have it cancelled because the tracks are warped.

The train company is Connex, or at least it will be until the end of the year, they just lost the contract to another company. Try searching Twitter for #connex and you’ll start to appreciate the depth of feeling some Melbournites have for the train company. People constantly Tweet about delays, cancellations and customer service incidents. It’s a fascinating real time feed from around the city that literally buzzes some rush hours as hundreds of people use their commute time to record what’s happening across the public transport network from minute to minute.

USA Today quotes Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff recently saying:

“Brands aren’t about ‘messages’ anymore. Brands today are conversations — and today the most important conversations are happening … through social media such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.”

It’s a lesson United Airlines learnt with amazing effect the other week (please be nice United, I’m flying with you to San Francisco on Monday!). A year or so ago a musician named Dave Carroll, on tour in the USA with his band Sons of Maxwell, was looking out the window of his aeroplane as it sat on the tarmac. He noticed, with horror, the baggage handlers were tossing his bags around, including his expensive guitar. I’ll spare you the entire saga – you can read all about it here – but suffice to say:

Guitar badly damaged
Musician endeavoured to complain to United Airlines
United Airlines managed to prevaricate, ignore, deny and pretty much every negative in the dictionary for a year
Musician and his band recorded a song about the experience, uploaded to MySpace – not a lot of traction
Musician and his band rounded up some friends and produced a video clip
Video uploaded to YouTube on a Monday (coincidentally the day of Michael Jackson’s funeral when you might be excused for thinking the world’s attention was elsewhere)
600,000 video views by the Thursday, and Oprah called (it’s now 4.6 million views)

United Airlines simply couldn’t avoid this. They’ve apologised, and asked to use the music video as part of their customer service training. Dave even recorded updates like this one. And here’s the guitar company getting in on the act!

Moral of the story:

Increasingly there are fewer places to hide. Poor customer service sucks. Your customers know it, and now they can tell many people (4.5 million in Dave’s case) just how much you suck. And get booked for the Oprah show to tell the most popular media personality in the world, live on air, how much your customer service sucks. If you want to avoid this type of ignominy maybe it’s time to re-examine how your online business deals with customers.

Here are five tried and tested tools you can use to deliver great customer service – whilst I’m skewing the list for online businesses, the reality this stuff will work whatever you do for a living.

1. Email

Answer it. Today. Not in a week or two. Aim to deal with customer service emails within one working day. We adopted that standard and it worked fine. And here’s a hint, if the person who normally would look after the customer service email address is going on safari for a month, redirect or forward the email to someone who will be in the office.

2. Twitter

Set up a Twitter account. Post to it. Encourage people to follow. And when they talk to you via Twitter, Tweet them back. I once Tweeted about a problem I had with the telephone company, within a couple of hours someone at the telco tweeted back and asked if the problem was still unresolved and could he help. Now that’s responsive. I didn’t even contact the phone company directly, they must be actively monitoring Twitter for their company name.

3. Skype

Set up a Skype account. Skype is God’s gift to customer service for small online businesses because of a seriously cool product called SkypeIn. This allows you to have a local telephone number in any one of more of hundreds of cities around the globe. We used to run web sites from Australia, but which catered to the UK and USA. So we had SkypeIn numbers in San Francisco and in London. That way people in those countries could dial a local number, but it rang our Skype account in Melbourne. Cheap as chips and brilliant.

4. GoToMeeting.com

I use GoToMeeting almost everyday. If you are in a business where you often need to, or wished you could, demonstrate things on your computer screen, GoToMeeting allows you to set up an online conference and share your desktop to one or many people anywhere online. My clients and I use it to look at agendas, check out designs, test site functionality and many other tasks. Combined with a Skype call, it’s like sitting in the same office all hunched around the same computer screen – except we’re in different continents and time zones.

5. Customer Service Chat

I use register.com for a lot of domain management. From time to time something doesn’t work out and I need their help. They have a live chat service where you can click a button and up pops a text chat window just like instant messaging. I’ve never waited more than a minute or two for a human to come on the line, and they’ve always without fail resolved my problem. There are many customer service chat systems, just Google.

Here’s an exercise for you:

Make a list of the ten things your customers ask most frequently. It doesn’t matter how minor, major or consequential. If these are the queries you spend time answering, include them on the list.

Now write a web page with those questions and your answers. Post it to your website, and add a link – that’s a Frequently Answered Questions page started. You can then augment or edit over time as need be.

We once did this exercise with a local town council. Turned out the most frequent query was a request to be sent a dog or cat registration form. So we uploaded them to the council’s web site. How simple.

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