Quit Hiding From The Customers
Customer service means great communication channels
Company, fall in!!!
At ease folks.
Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em (and if you don’t see any "Don’t Smoke Here" signs)
Now, listen up troops.
We’ve got a serious situation here, ladies and gentlemen. We have ecommerce entrepreneurs among us who are invisible, wish to remain anonymous or otherwise hide behind their websites. This is not a good thing. In fact it is downright Un-American.
I surfed a few of your sites the other day and was dismayed, to say the least, that some of you are still doing your best not to get noticed or have customers get in touch with you without having to hire our pals over in the FBI to find you.
I went to that site that sells the recycled gumballs—you know www.alreadychewed.com and went to the Contact Us page. Now I realize that you have to have a perverse sense of humor to sell your product, but come on, a 12-field form, with all fields required, just to ask a question—most customers are on to that data dredging thing. Of course, there was no phone number or address, and on the About Us page there was this cute little doggie wagging his tail and a paragraph about how you love pets. What kind of non-self-promoting drivel is that anyway?
Meanwhile, I checked in a www.weselleverything.com – whoa dude, I wouldn’t want my mother or my sister to see that one, that tattoo lady is something else though, but what the hey we all have our little foibles…
What is it Snivley?
What’s a foible?
It’s a weakness a character flaw, like when you buy one of those Commie flags they sell. Actually, troops, there, is a military relationship in the definition of foible, it originally meant the weak section of the sword blade, that being from the middle to the tip. Allow me a little military metaphor, if your promotional sword has a foible, you're in for a bug out. Semper Fi my man.
Anyway, nowhere on the whole site was there anyway to get in touch with the company, nowhere could I find the name of the head shed or even the janitor. No phones, no address, nuthin’ nada. They could have just put a big header on the home page that said, “Customer Service? Forget It!”
Let me ask you a question. Would you build a big store in, say, New York City or Seattle, then paint the front white and have no sign or address number on it? And would you refuse to put the address, the phone number or your name on all your business cards. Of course, if you ran any ads for your store you wouldn’t put the address in the ads let alone the phone number.
That’s exactly what anyone who has a website is doing when there is no in-depth contact information on the site. You’re just telling the customer, “Buy my stuff, but don’t bother me.” Hey, just because you have a domain name and a URL doesn’t mean you’ve branded yourself or set up lines of communication with customers.
Seems to me that if you can’t put your name on a business you run, you must be hidin’ from something or somebody. Or, maybe you are just the last of the Neanderthals left on the planet.
You again Snively?
Neanderthal? Hmm, Snively, Left Face! Now you’re lookin’ at one. Yeah, your pal Salinski there has got a website that doesn’t even have a contact page. Salinski drop and give me 20.
Okay, here’s the deal folks. If you’re going to make it over Heartbreak Hill and into the Valley of Victory in the ecommerce wars, you have to run your cyber store better than you ran your brick and mortar store, no ifs, ands or buts. That means super customer service and super customer service includes making sure the folks you want as customers can get in touch with you as easy as picking up the phone or clicking on an email link.
They want to know who they are dealing with, tell ‘em your story. Even Snively, there, has a story – pitiful as it is. Shameless self promotion is not a sin people. People want to deal with people not binary codes on a screen.
What is it Snively?
Binary? Jeez. (throat clearing) It’s short for “buy nary a thing from an ecommerce business that isn’t 100 percent up front and available for communications with you.”
Got it?
Dismissed.
1 Comment
metalk12 says:
You have a valid point. I will make the necessary change in my site www.thebuyersnet.com.
