The Ultimate Online Customer Service Guide: How to Connect with your Customers to Sell More!

Introduction

Though I’ve run a small business for much of my life, I’m a consumer, as well.

It’s human nature to desire choice. We want to be able to choose one item over another or one vendor over another, based on a variety of reasons. When we exchange our hard-earned money for an item or a service, we ask for something else in return: to be treated with respect and honesty. We prefer to do business with people like us, because we want to believe that those we trust to have our best interests at heart. Think about it: Have you ever asked a sales clerk in a clothing store how a particular outfit looked on you? How handsome you looked in that flashy sports car?

I’ve been writing about eBay for e-commerce vendors for over 12 years, and in that time I’ve seen thousands of homespun businesses fail in their attempts to become work-from-home moguls. Why? Because many felt—due to the fact that they were selling online—they could omit the personal touch. It made selling so much easier (or so they thought) to never have to actually deal with their customers. They thought they could ignore the small niceties that made customers happy to be doing business with them. Time—and a lot of unsuccessful companies—have shown that these assumptions were wrong.

If merchants or service providers put their bottom line before the customer, they will doom their businesses to ultimate failure. They may flourish for a while, maybe even long enough to sell their business to another company and walk away with a healthy profit. But to create a long-term, stable business, you need to have long-term, loyal customers. The best companies grow as a result of positive word of mouth—both in the real world and on the Internet.

Online customer service is an important part of marketing your business. Brilliant, spot-on marketing not only generates revenue for your bottom line; it’s also a way to make your customer’s life easier. When you give someone quality service, you’re a step ahead of your competition.

Most customer service experts fill the books they write and their conference presentations with instructions for growing larger businesses. Though they can charge thousands of dollars for their advice, it’s often not completely translatable to a small-staffed enterprise.

I enjoy working with small businesses; they’re the bread and butter of our economy. There are a lot more mom-and-pops out there than there are big businesses. As you’ll learn in The Ultimate Online Customer Service Guide, mom-and-pop businesses can employ more than a hundred people, and without losing their personal attachment to their business. Whether we choose to work in a large or small business environment differs from one person to another, of course; some people are more geared to the detachment inherent in running a big business. However, there are plenty of us who enjoy being part of the daily excitement of running our own companies.

Small businesspeople have the benefit of putting their hearts into what they do, every single day. They truly care about whether their customers enjoy the food, clothing, or the service they provide. It’s personal to them; it should be personal to their customers.

I’ve been working with small and medium businesses for most of my career. I’ve aided companies that work out of garages, spare rooms, and even barns. I’ve helped these individuals figure out where they should spend their money to grow, and spoken with them on even the deepest, most personal levels. I’ve heard from students, newlyweds, career changers, and retirees, and I’ve found that pretty much everyone has the same goal: They want to make more money. Sadly, however, I’ve also learned that only a small percentage really wants to work for it.

Those who understand that nothing comes easy, and that the traditional work ethic pays off, become thriving entrepreneurs. Such people become the heart and soul of small business; and it is these small companies that often can reach their customers online much more adeptly than large corporations.

Just how important is small business to our overall economy? As defined by the Small Business Administration (SBA), small businesses are those with fewer than 500 employees—a risk-taking, crazy group of entrepreneurs who create more than half of the nonfarm, private gross domestic product (GDP) in the United States—yes, more than half. Need more proof as to how important small businesses are to the economic health of our country? These organizations:

Represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms.

Employ just over half of all private-sector employees.

Pay 44 percent of total U.S. private payroll.

Have generated 64 percent of net new jobs over the past 15 years.

Hire 40 percent of high-tech workers—like scientists, engineers, and computer programmers.

Are 52 percent home-based and 2 percent franchises.

Comprised 97.3 percent of all identified exporters, and produced 30.2 percent of the known export value in 2007.

Produce 13 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms—patents that are twice as likely as large-firm patents to be among the 1 percent most cited.¹

An earlier study found that of the 5,369,068 employer firms in the United States, 99.7 percent had fewer than 500 employees, and 78.8 percent had fewer than 10 employees in 1997. More recent data also suggests that very small firms—those with fewer than 10 employees—hire part-time employees at a rate almost twice that of very large firms (1,000 or more employees). If small firms did not hire these part-time employees, they might otherwise be unemployed.

I worked with brick-and-mortar retailers for over a decade, managing advertising and marketing for several super-regional malls (shopping centers with more than 800,000 square feet of leasable area) during their heyday in the 1990s. But just because they were big didn’t mean that they always took their customers’ needs into consideration.

One Los Angeles center I handled was part of a national chain. The corporate office expected the mall to run the standard advertising program (designed for suburban white neighborhoods) in this center’s highly Hispanic market. My proposed idea of running a bilingual campaign, which featured models in the ads that reflected members of the community, was seen as heresy—initially. But since sales were falling, they were ready to try my wacky idea, to respect the predominant customer culture. In retrospect, it seems shocking that my theory was once considered ground-breaking.

Perhaps that’s why I felt I had to write this book. Much that I see and hear nowadays—including the advice of well-intentioned experts—ignores the human element of business. A good product is paramount, yes, but if there’s no personal connection in the way you relate to your customers, you will not succeed. It may take time to fail, but the fall will come. Marketing with the goal of making your customer feel included and part of your community is in your—and your customers’—best interest. It places your business within their trusted circle. Communication is the best way to strengthen your customer’s loyalty.

Another of my clients, an e-commerce company, needed me to help them expedite their product photography by automating their storage and shipping. After we implemented changes, the company was running like a Swiss clock. Its profits went from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands . . . and then I got a call. The company was about to be thrown off of eBay (its largest market at the time). Why, I asked incredulously. Its business model was near-perfect.

Upon arriving at headquarters, I interviewed the people in the customer service department. I learned that their computers were clogged with complaint e-mails, and reps were sending out automated responses without following up with customers. Eventually, the staff began deleting e-mails en masse due to their frustration. I told them they had to make customer service a top priority, that they had to make things right. They had to learn how to take it in the shorts when they were at fault.

Unfortunately, they didn’t take me seriously, and this company ended up spending thousands of dollars on highly billing consultants, to no avail. Customers filed Federal Trade Commission (FTC) complaints, and you can probably guess the outcome. A brilliant business model was ruined due to one organization’s lack of concern for its customers. Though it had spent thousands on consultants and fancy marketing tools, without the primary ingredient—respect for the customer—it was doomed.

Perhaps it was the advent of technology that has caused us to stray from the personalization of our businesses. Technology has enabled more people to run successful businesses for a lot less money, a lot of them remotely. Sadly, there’s no humanity involved in the kind of technologies that have been sold to businesses.

Since the beginning of civilization, wealth and businesses were built on a simple tenet: Someone sold something to someone else. This is nothing new; it’s been this way since biblical times. Whether we’re trading, interacting, or selling, we are all customers and vendors in one form or another. Most would argue that this oldest profession relies on the exchange of favors for money; but, indeed, the oldest profession is merely a form of entrepreneurship.

At the turn of the century, my great-grandmother supported her three sons by standing on the docks at Ellis Island and buying the long tresses of immigrant women as they came off the ships. (There was an entire community of settlers who made a living from one another. Money for an immigrant in a new country was a huge factor in starting out right, and they all helped each other.) My great-grandmother would then sell the hair to wig makers, whose creations festooned the heads of New York’s elite. Though I suppose it was considered a cottage industry back then, my great-grandmother would likely be called an entrepreneur today. Whatever the label, it was a win-win situation for all involved. She worked on trust and reputation. Those weren’t easy days for anyone.

Consider any job or occupation nowadays. Everything involves selling—taking the risk, developing a business—all for the sake of profit in the end.

But what about employees? Yes, there are ranks of workers who perhaps do not even come in contact with your clients. However, their effort is reflected in your company’s bottom line. Your goal for your business is to turn a profit, but you can’t do this without customers, and your employees are your conduit to gaining more customers.

Customer service, community, and trust aren’t just terms for the big guys like the phone company, your credit card provider, or your Internet service provider. It’s something we all come to expect from everyone with whom we do business, in one form or another. As a businessperson, you’ve got to make customer service more than a buzzword or phrase. It cannot simply be lip service; rather, it has to be the underlying tenet, the foundation for your business.

In my attempt to become a retail marketing expert (though I really don’t like that term), I attended seminar after seminar, designed to teach merchants how to manage their customers—because customers are the lifeblood of commerce. I sat in big rooms with groups of small businesspeople like myself. I listened to the speakers (because I was told they were experts) and absorbed as much as I could. I admit that I sat there like the rest of the audience, nodding my head in agreement with the presenters, even when I really wasn’t sure what they were talking about. In fact, we looked like a sea of bobble-head dolls. Looking back, I wonder if anyone else besides me felt that only a small percentage of what the speakers were saying really applied to my business situation.

When we attend such conferences, we often get wrapped up in the plethora of acronyms: VRM, CRM, ACES . . . (they do go on). We learn; we listen to the experts; we nod our heads in agreement and vow to follow the latest and greatest customer acquisition and satisfaction methods.

A note here on the use of acronyms: I will not use acronyms in this book; instead, I will use the actual words, and define the more popular ones. Too many of us often fall into the habit of using this kind of techno-jargon because the terms fly off the tongue so easily, making our conversation seem so much more efficient. But using acronyms can make communication less meaningful and more unintelligible for those who do not use or hear them regularly. It’s too easy to forget, for example, that the C in CRM stands for customer. Our customers are not just a C, and we must never lose sight of that.

We read blogs and books, attend these conferences, and listen to the experts, all the while trying to make a complicated science out of a basic human need: the desire to be treated with respect. We are all clients, customers, patients, consumers, shoppers; we all exchange money for services and merchandise. As consumers with choices, we can go anywhere we want to spend our money. The one thing we all have in common is that we are human beings. As human beings, we hope to maintain a little dignity in our everyday lives—including when we make buying decisions. We hope that manufacturers and providers will have a little respect for us and our family.

Respect for your customer—and the hard-earned money they pay for your service or merchandise—is the key to giving superior customer service.

Our society used to care whether we got value for our dollars. But lately, we just seem to be looking for the cheapest, quickest, easiest way to acquire products and services. In this process, we don’t always respect the seller or supplier, do we? Yet when we get lousy, disrespectful treatment, it makes us angry and annoyed.

You might say that, in many instances, human respect—both toward and from our vendors—has diminished significantly in recent years. We need to turn this around and begin to provide a good customer experience for all customers, without charging ridiculously high prices.

Where do you go to complain when you feel that you’ve been wronged by a business? What happens when something goes awry? Who do you turn to? That’s when we pay the high cost for our low expectations.

We have lots of new tools on the Internet—specifically, within social media—that are meant to help us engage and interact with our customers. And, again, there are a lot of experts out there who are making fortunes showing us how to use these tools. Blogs and Web sites like Facebook and Twitter are the shiny new things. In fact, many claim to be the panacea that will make all our customer service woes disappear—and bring millions to our doors.

I’ve always put my e-mail address in the introduction of all my books, and tried to make myself accessible to anyone who writes to me. Considering the number of books I’ve sold over the past few years—well, you can just imagine how many people have contacted me. And though it’s taken a lot of my time, I want to hear stories of businesses that thrive, and I enjoy seeing people overcome their problems on the way to success—because I really do care when someone reads my words and acts on them. I want to know what worked—and what didn’t—in order to better serve my future readers.

I also get e-mails every day from readers of my Google profile, blog, or the feedback on my Web site, www.coolebaytools.com. While there is a disclaimer on my Web site that states that I can’t always respond to every e-mail I get, I guarantee that I read them all—and I do. I receive questions that run the gamut from basic to advanced, and it can be overwhelming at times. I often find myself resisting the urge to say, "You can find that information on page 126 of Title XYZ." I answer as often as I can, and try to be helpful—because I know that in order to keep an online community alive, both my supporters and I must remain active within it.

Social media can do all that and more. In The Ultimate Online Customer Service Guide, I will use everyday examples to show you how businesses are doing it right, as well as discuss those that are doing it wrong.

You can build a community with your customers. That’s another term we hear a lot of these days. But community has always been the backbone of trust. Great-grandma had her community of immigrants, who supported each other and kept in contact. In the early days of our country, communities were formed to help people develop a feeling of worth. In the 1950s, they met at Floyd’s barber shop and shared their daily news and gossip. In the 1990s, our communities took the form of malls, where everyone shopped, met for lunch, and attended events.

We have always embraced communities for introducing us to people with whom we have things in common. Nowadays, these communities are centered not only around schools and churches, sports and hobbies, but we can also find them on the Internet.

Community has likewise become part of corporate culture—and when it’s done right, it becomes the basis of how we do business. Remember: Your customer is a human being. You are a human being. We thrive on respect and being part of a community. I hate to throw out a cliché like, Do unto others . . . but it’s appropriate here.

Years ago, when someone had a lousy experience with a business, he or she passed on those negative feelings to perhaps 20 of his or her friends. Today, via the use of social media, a single one of your customers can broadcast a message to a million of his or her closest acquaintances.

Whether you have a retail location or a business practice—whether you even ever physically interact with your customer—you can ensure that you have happy customers. Your customers should always walk away from an interaction with you with a feeling of wonder—the feeling of wow.

Joseph Jaffe, a noted thought leader on new marketing and president of crayon, described as a strategic consultancy that helps its clients achieve positive change and impact by joining the conversation, has always been a fan of following the customer’s humanity. I met him several years ago and have continually enjoyed his vocal, honest perspectives. In his recent Customer Service Manifesto he echoed the