As web designers we can only do so much for you the client. You can have the best website in the world, but if your customer service stinks users won’t come back.

I went to meet with a new client yesterday and was blown away by their commitment to customer service. Not only had they addressed every one of their customers’ points of pain, they had gone above and beyond in so many ways.

An unbelievable returns policy

The most stunning example of this was their returns policy.

If you are lucky a website will offer you a 30 day return policy if the goods are unopened and so can be resold. If you are unlucky they will not accept returns at all or charge a restocking fee.

However, with our new client things are radically different. They offer a 365 day return policy! However, they don’t stop there. You can return products that have been used and cannot be resold. Better still they will even pay the postage for you to return the goods.
It is truly staggering. So much so that the problem is convincing the user the offer is genuine!

A culture of service

However, it is more than that. They have the right culture too. I was fortunate enough to chat with their call centre staff. Currently they offer customers three ways to contact them…

• Phone
• Email
• Live chat

I asked which contact method they preferred. I expected them to say email first, followed by live chat and finally phone. After all, when on the phone you can only deal with a single customer at a time.

Email and live chat are much more cost effective. However my expectations were entirely wrong. The answer was the phone because “it is the quickest way customers could get their problems resolved”.

Davi Sales Batista, Shutterstock

A growing trend

What’s interesting is that this client is not alone. More and more companies are realising that to compete on the web they cannot sell on product and price alone.

The problem is that competition is fierce and the chances of having a unique product low. With your competition only a click away and savvy customers doing price comparison you are left with two choices – be the cheapest or be the best.

What this new breed of web businesses are realising is that racing to be the cheapest is a loser’s game. Eventually there is only so much that can reduce your margins. Instead they have discovered that customers (especially online) are willing to pay more for convenience.

In today’s society time is as important a currency as money and users will often choose a more expensive option if it saves them time quibbling over returns or being on hold with customer services.
There are many poster children for this movement including the likes of Zappos. What these pioneers are proving is that the increase in revenue outweighs the costs involved.

On face value limiting customer service may seem like a good idea. However, in doing so you are putting short term objectives over the long term health of your business.

Think long term

Recently I wrote a post in which I said that business objectives are more important than users needs. However, that is not an excuse for neglecting your users. If you care about achieving long term business success, then you have to put great customer service and the user’s needs at the heart of what you do.

As web designers we can help you. We can make intuitive sites that are both painless and pleasurable to use. However, that is only half the battle. We also need you (the website owner) to continue that pleasurable experience in terms of customers service. What happens offline is as important as what happens online.

What about you?

So ask yourself – how could you be helping your customers more? Have you hidden away your phone number because you don’t want users calling you? Have you added in extra fields to your contact form so you can collect demographic data for spamming? Have you limited your returns policy for fear of people abusing it? What about hidden costs? Are there charges for returns or delivery?

Whether you are running an e-commerce site or an informational one the message is the same, provide outstanding user experience both on the site and off.

Posts from the Econsultancy blog

The platforms offered by companies like Facebook, Twitter and Apple
offer entrepreneurs some very compelling features. They often bring to
the table built-in audiences, and, in some cases, established business
models.

For reasons like these, it’s no surprise that a growing number of
entrepreneurs are building entire companies on top of a specific
platform. And it’s no surprise that investors have flocked to back them.

But are platform-specific startups all they’re cracked up to be? While some have achieved wild levels of success, there’s a lot to dislike about trying to building a business on top of somebody else’s platform. For one, the ease with which one can usually develop on these platforms means that there’s a lot of competition. That makes building a viable business a bit tougher. But even more important is the fact that being dependent on a third party’s platform is an inherently risky business proposition.

It appears that investors may increasingly be less willing to turn a blind eye to the negatives of platform-specific startups. According to CB Insights, investments in ‘pure-play‘ Twitter startups have dropped by 50% in a year’s time. From June 2008 to May 2009, investors poured nearly m in “companies whose product or platform is predicated wholly on the Twitter platform.” From June 2009 to May 2010, that amount was cut to just under .5m.

CB Insights notes that the decrease in investment might have something to do with the uncertainty about Twitter’s changing approach vis-à-vis developers and the role they’ll play in Twitter’s future. It might also have something to do with the fact that building a viable business around Twitter looks a lot tougher than building a cool startup around Twitter.

Is the reduced investment in pure-play Twitter startups indicative of a broader trend affecting all platform-specific startups? Perhaps not. According to CB Insights, investments in companies focused on the iPhone and iPad rose 220% in the period June 2009 to May 2010 from the same period a year earlier. Obviously, when it comes to the bottom line, the iPhone/iPad ecosystem arguably has a much more compelling profile for investors.

But increased investment in iPhone/iPad startups over the past year doesn’t mean that the reduced appetite for Twitter-focused startups should be ignored. While this may partially be the result of trends specific to the Twitter platform, there is some common wisdom in the notion that building a business that is wholly dependent on another company’s platform isn’t the best pathway to long-term success. Platforms come and go, and the best still evolve and devolve. Even the slower investors will eventually recognize that. And the smartest will understand this: savvy entrepreneurs think multi-platform. In other words, they know how to tap into powerful platforms, but they don’t necessarily want those platforms to serve as the foundation for their entire business.

Posts from the Econsultancy blog