3 Reasons Online Customers Never Return

It doesn’t take a record-breaking holiday shopping season to realize that most online shoppers are vulnerable to the advances of competing online retailers. But when it comes to a decline in return customers, blaming a lack of customer loyalty on the competition is the easy way out. Now is the perfect time to commit to tracking the number of first-time shoppers who actually come back in months to come—not to mention, those who don’t. And from there, put a plan in place for increasing customer loyalty.

There are many reasons customers will only buy from a site once. It could be that you offered them something they couldn’t get anywhere else, but didn’t give them a good reason to return when they were there. It could also be the overall usability of your site, a lack of necessary information, a poor checkout process… The list goes on. The bottom line is that they didn’t find the shopping experience memorable—and you may never see them again.

Tips to Go Above and Beyond With Customer Service

These days, providing adequate customer service is not enough.

You need to go above and beyond the call of duty to provide customer service that truly stands out. How do you do this?

Begin by thinking about your own experience as a customer -- what you liked and disliked in certain situations.

Customer Service, Holistically

Two online platforms that help small businesses respond to customer commentary.

These days, customer communication comes in many forms, including phone calls, emails, and tweets. Whatever the medium, online customer service platforms make it easier to field and respond to questions and complaints. Here are two to consider. 

Building Customer Communities Is the Key to Creating Value

What are your customers telling their friends and colleagues about your business? As I described in my last post, your prospective customers and buyers increasingly learn about you from their peers — including your current customers — while tending more and more to ignore traditional sales and marketing communications from corporate. Companies are now taking advantage of this new marketing reality, becoming more skilled at getting their customers to advocate for them, create peer influence in their markets, and make important contributions in areas like product development and services.

Creating and capturing such value from customer relationships doesn't just happen, no matter how stellar your products and services are. It requires an enhanced value proposition, what I call a Level 4 customer value proposition.

Should You Outsource Your Customer Service?

Scratch the old ringy-dingy call center that answers unattended phones. Step up to the 21st-century "contact center" that fully integrates online, mobile and land line communications, whether inbound from customers, outbound from the company or both. How much or how little integration is up to you.

Services can include monitoring and managing email, voice, real-time chat, fax, website orders or queries, IVR (interactive voice response) menus, mobile SMS, call routing, multimedia queuing, automated callbacks and more. That's 24/7, so multimedia orders or complaints after hours are covered, too.

You also have a choice of operations. Some centers house agents all under one roof. Others employ home-based or far-flung agents who remotely log in. Some have only American staff while others work with agents abroad. High-performing centers can be big or small. Some work with land lines and in-house servers. Others rely on VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) and use cloud-based applications.

Customer Service Key for Ecommerce; 6 Pointers

As ecommerce business owners, we tend to think in terms of policies, inventory, and operations. But the most important part of our businesses is customers. A customer-centric organization considers how every decision will impact the customer experience.

Here are some ways good customer service can be incorporated into your store policies.

Make It Easy to Return Products

If you know a customer bought a product from you, don’t require him or her to produce a receipt or prove they purchased it. With today’s sophisticated customer relationship management systems, it’s imperative to know the buying history and habits of your customers. A robust CRM will come in handy in so many scenarios.

Three small business customer service fails and one that works

In the lead-up to Christmas I realised how disproportionately annoyed customers can get with some of the businesses that are out there by experiencing unprofessional service first-hand - especially after comparing it to a first-rate one.

Company A

We're about to renovate our house so I Googled for "bathroom designer Melbourne" and found Company A on the first page (they've got great SEO) who is highly awarded. My first clue should have been the high-end bathrooms featured on their website. I explained we had a $15,000-20,000 budget and the woman booking the designer didn't pre-qualify me but asked for $280 upfront for his visit and subsequent design, which could be deducted from our job. I paid.

Future of Customer Service in a Social World

In the good old days, if we had to contact our bank or for that matter any business, we used to reach out to our phones and give them a call.

The call would then be routed to a call center (usually, after about 10-15 minutes of listening to some music that would be played while we waited for an agent to get free and take our call).

This, of course would be after having had to find our way through the maze of options (which used to be so complicated that it required us to be entirely focused on the options, blacking out everything else in life).

Then the times changed. Emails got ubiquitous and we could write an email to contact with the business. However, we still used the phone as the primary means for contacting someone at the business who could help us solve whatever it was that we were trying to solve.

Are you connecting with your new generation of customers…Generation C?

As you’ll no doubt read here over and over again, social media is important to your business. If you don’t engage on Twitter, Facebook, or Youtube, you’ll eventually go out of business. At least that’s what the experts will have you believe. Fear tactics are not so much as effective in business or defining customer relationships as they are at creating a sense of [contrived] controversy. I must be honest with you however. While social media is indeed a game changer, it is not the magnum opus of your legacy. I would like to introduce you to what really is important…your customers. Allow me to be a bit more specific. This isn’t just about your customers. This is about how a growing number of your customers are changing how they influence and are influenced, how they communicate and connect, how they learn, discover and share, how they make decisions and how they take action.

How Rapportive Helps Businesses Manage Customer Relationships

Everybody knows the old saw, "It's not what you know, it's who you know." But, do you really know who you know? Probably not as well as you'd like.

Between pocketing business cards, filling up your smartphone contacts and expanding your social media connections, trying to remember who's who gets tough. But San Francisco-based Rapportive is here to help. The company's free-to-download Gmail extension automatically collects information about the person you're e-mailing, including Twitter account content, Facebook posts, LinkedIn data and any other material tied to that e-mail address. The info is displayed as a simple sidebar, usually replacing the distracting paid ads on the right side of the page.

How Does Social Media Impact Consumer Behavior?

Most businesses, only to join the bandwagon, spread themselves overly thin by developing their profiles upon innumerable sites; creating a disconnect with consumers if the business does not respond. There will include specific things which a company ought to take into account prior to placing itself up upon social media. Here, we’ll assess a few of them:

Know Target Audience

Why social media means customer service can make or break your brand

Customer service is often the lesser cousin to self-congratulatory brand marketing, and for a long time customers have simply endured this situation as they were effectively powerless to do anything about it. But no more. Increasing customer frustration is being match by growing pressure on brands to service the customers they have says the newly released 2012 American Express® Global Customer Service Barometer.

Not surprisingly, social media is instrumental in this shift. Consumers are using social media are wielding growing influence, telling more people about their service experiences, good and bad.

Think like a Marketer, Operate as a Consumer

Big corporations, small businesses, non-profits, and even politicians are seeing the value in social media, which means that the surge in social media marketing and advertisements will only continue to increase.

According to a report from the Royal Bank of Scotland 9 out of 10 medium to large-sized businesses in the UK will maintain or spend more on their social media budget for 2012. Borrell Associates stated that the total local online social spend in the US will grow from an estimated $1.1 billion in 2011 to $7.8 billion in 2016.

Customers Exaggerate, So Don’t Overreact

This week’s theme on the blog seems to be customer service and online reviews, but that’s not by design. It’s just the way it happened as I have been writing my posts. I’d like to pretend that these issues that relate to small business were planned for Small Business Week, but it’s just dumb luck.

On Monday, I shared a sign from a restaurant that found a creative way to battle a negative Yelp review. One customer had apparently posted about how the restaurant served the worst meatball sub he had ever had, and it got me thinking about the way we describe things and use superlatives.

Small Business Strategy: 10 Trends to Watch

The business landscape is shifting right under your company foundation as you read this.  How customers make decisions, how they discover, communicate, and share, how they influence and are influenced, is evolving. In fact, customer behavior is not only changing, it’s fragmenting.
Your business will now have to compete for the customers you know and additionally, a new breed of customers that you need to know.  And, to earn their attention and ultimately their loyalty, you will need to better understand the top technology trends and how they’re impacting customer behavior.
At the heart of this customer divide is technology. But this isn’t about the technology you know, such as PCs, laptops, iPods, ebook readers, DVRs, etc. This change in consumerism is the inevitable result of disruptive technology and how it has affected behavior and reshaped expectations.

How to Increase Online Customer Loyalty By 82%

You know the facts. Increasing customer loyalty…

• yields big profits over the long haul

• creates raving fans that promote your products for free

• is cheaper than finding new customers

But the question remains. How can you increase customer loyalty online?

Is Shopping Online Really Cheaper?

Who doesn't love shopping? Ohh... we all do! Even those people who deny it. So, what about online shopping? Nothing better than being able to shop from the comfort of your own home. But, is it cheaper than your trip to the mall? Let's investigate.
It is just so convenient to switch on your laptop or computer, browse through a couple of online shopping websites and place your order. M-Commerce has become so popular that you can now even make a purchase on your cell phones. You can shop while on the go. It doesn't take more than a couple of minutes and you do not even have to step out of the door.

Seven Ways to Keep Customers Engaged over the Summer

Summertime can mean big changes to the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts. Between vacations, outdoor events, and school being out, customer buying habits change and attention spans shorten. People use mobile devices more to check email in the summer months and are slower to respond to email. Even your own internal resources get stretched as people take time off for vacations.
So how do you keep your customers engaged during the lazy, hazy days of summer?

Need Customer Service Help? There’s a Bot for That

Online customer service 24/7 can be hard to swing on a small business budget. But there is another solution.

Few new small businesses can afford to employ a full-time customer service rep to handle random inquiries online. The costs are high, and there are long periods of inactivity.
There is another way. A plethora of companies offer avatars that can answer customer questions for you. Some are intentionally cartoon-like, others look like a real person who will respond with a laugh and a smile. In most cases, they only require a few install steps—usually, copying the code into your own site and "programming" the bot to answer questions.

Here are four to check out: