Pre and After Sales Support
Will your product / service require technical support? The perfect internet product is one that requires as little customer contact as possible. Take ‘books’ for example, there is very little that can go wrong with a book? As long as the description is good and your packaging keeps it well protected, customer support will be minimal. This is one of the reasons Amazon is one of the biggest internet retail companies today.
Some technical products will require you to provide support for your customers. One way or another you need to make sure that your customers are paying for this support; otherwise you and your staff will get bogged down with hour upon hour of technical calls that don’t make you any money. So it is essential that the customer is charged for the support the product generates, failing to do so could cost you the success of your business. Support can be provided in one of the following ways:
- Reflected in the purchase price – you can add the average support cost to the initial purchase price of the product
- Premium rate telephone line – where incoming support calls are charged at a certain amount per minute (we have found that some customers find premium lines a little annoying, if you use this technique make sure the people taking the calls are highly knowledgeable)
- Support contracts – where the customer pays a regular fee for access to support staff
Look at the documentation you provide with your products, the better the documentation the less support calls the product will generate. With products purchased from Asia some of the documentation maybe a little hard to understand. We have saved hundreds of hours on the phone by spending a few hours revising poor documentation making it easier to understand.
When you describe your product always try to be realistic, under promise and over perform. Happy customers tell their family and friends about your products and services. Unhappy customers return their goods, ask for a refund and complain to their friends and family about your products and services. Even when you are retailing on the internet customer referrals are one of the best sources of sales growth.
Product returns are one of the most expensive aspects of trading on-line. Credit cards have to be refunded, the postal costs are lost and the goods are often not resalable through your normal channels. Being honest and realistic about your product / service will drastically minimize customer returns.