As web sites and company stores become more of a standard operating procedure for businesses—like having a business card or voice mail—customers will begin looking at the complete web experience as a way of evaluating vendors. Whether you know it or not, your site or company store program will likely be shopped against other vendors—and not just for price, but for features, convenience and ease of use. In the near future, your ability to attract and retain customers will depend, at least in part, on the technology choices you make.

When someone says “customer service experience,” you probably don’t immediately think of technology as one of the biggest factors. After all, customer service is really about people—their responsiveness, their friendliness and their accuracy. But technology is the tool that enables most customer service experiences—phone calls, faxes and e-mails quite likely form the bulk of your customer service load right now. If you have a poor voice mail system, your customers will hang up and give up (companies that handle thousands of calls per hour have a special term for this: “abandonment rate”).

No one buys an unfriendly voicemail system intentionally, and if you got enough complaints you’d probably change yours. But what about those lost calls? Abandonment occurs on a small scale as well, and that’s why you need to constantly evaluate and improve your customer service experience. The amount of business lost to bad customer service experiences every year is staggering—and as promotional products become even more “commoditized,” the cost of switching to a vendor with better customer service will soon be negligible. To keep your business growing, you’ve got to make customer service a cohesive experience in all areas of your business.

The Basics
Web-based customer service too often translates to little more than an “E-mail Us” link on every page of your site. That’s fine, but why not cover a lot of the bases that you typically deal with in other customer service areas as well?

Here’s a checklist of customer service “must-haves” for your site:

Business hours—Save yourself a few incoming phone calls by posting these:
Addresses—Both business and mailing addresses (if different).
Contact information—The more the better; if you can identify specific e-mail addresses of sales and customer service reps or departments, by all means do so.
Feedback—Always provide a link (even if it goes to the same address as the other contacts) for customer feedback. You want your customers’ opinions of your web site to help make it better.
Frequently asked questions—Got a common customer service question that eats up phone time? Put it on the web site. You’ll be surprised at how many customers refer to frequently asked question lists (or FAQs as they’re commonly known) for information on ordering, artwork requirements, and a variety of other topics that typically require a phone call or e-mail to answer.
Many customers use the Internet these days the same way they use the Yellow Pages, and the web offers even more information. It’s up to you how much data about your business you want to provide, but if you get frequent phone calls for a given piece of information—like your mailing address or shipping address—put it up on your site. It may only save you a call or two every month, but those calls add up over time.

Stepping Up to Forms
Once you’ve got the basics covered, you should consider streamlining your customers’ experience—and easing your own internal support burden—by directing customers to web forms. Forms are just web pages with boxes or fields on them for entering data. A simple form might be a feedback page where, rather than just sending a free-form e-mail, the customer can enter their name, e-mail address, choose the area of the site they’d like to provide feedback on, and specify whether or not they’d like to be contacted.

This is a convenient solution for the customer, because he/she can make selections from menus rather than entering a lot of information manually. It also shows the client you’re serious about customer service.

But perhaps most important, a structured feedback form helps you get the right information to the right person. Since the recipient at your company is coded into the form, you know the e-mail is heading to someone who’s been tasked with evaluating feedback, rather than to a salesperson or assistant who might not forward it on. The biggest benefit, though, is that you get the information you need rather than just a generic complaint or a far-reaching rant.

Forms essentially constrain information into useful structures, just like your printed quote forms and order forms. In fact, you should really use them everywhere you can, especially if you or your web site service provider has the ability to create “auto responses” from the forms.

Auto responses are e-mails that are triggered by a form submission—your customer submits his/her feedback, and in return receives an e-mail that thanks him/her and promises to contact them within a few days. Auto responses can be generic or eloquent; either way, they reassure customers that their correspondence is valuable and provide a record of the correspondence.

Above and Beyond
Forms can do other things beyond simple communication, and if your operation supports any kind of electronic order status or art submission, you should use forms to enable these features on your web site.

An order status form where your customer can enter an order number to receive status can be an enormous relief on your customer service operation. In addition, a form for artwork submission can save your production department hours of troubleshooting by providing the customer with artwork guidelines and forcing them to specify file types, versions, and other vital information about the art file. If you don’t have the capability to deal with art or order status online, talk to your web developer or service provider.

If you really want to take customer service to the next level, consider live support options on your site. If you get a good deal of traffic and frequently answer calls from customers who are on your site and have questions about something on the site, a live chat service can be a huge time-saver for your customer service group. Live chat works by giving the customer a link on every page—usually labeled “talk to representative now,” or similar—that he/she can click and start a text-based chat session with a customer service rep. If you’ve never used one of these systems, it’s a lot like e-mail but instantaneous and interactive; it’s essentially a live conversation in text.

A live chat session can be much less expensive than a long customer call into your toll-free number, and that brings us to the underlying benefit of many web-based customer service initiatives: They save you money. Every e-mail that can be answered with an automated response, every phone call eliminated by publishing information and every art file that you receive correctly formatted saves you cost elsewhere in your operation. So, while good web-based customer service is vital in gaining the edge against your competition, it’s also an integral part of cost reduction for your operation.

One last note: You should look for the same level of customer service that you wish to achieve in your web service provider or developer. If they don’t have a smooth customer service operation on their site, how can you expect the company to deal with yours? Web technology is increasingly less expensive these days, so if your provider doesn’t provide the kind of customer service you need, there’s little to keep you from switching as well.

Brent Buford is a co-founder of eBlox, a Tucson, AZ and Austin, TX-based web development firm. He can be reached at brent@eblox.com.