If you are running a business you need to ensure that your website is designed with your customer in mind. It’s important to remember that visiting and interacting with your website is the only contact that most customers will have with your business, so you need to make sure it’s a good experience. You have to ensure that everything is in place to enable customers to use your website in a seamless fashion.
We are going to take a look at some of the design features which should be integrated into a website in order to provide high quality customer service.
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Creating a self-help facility
One of the biggest reasons why customers are likely to abandon a website is the inability to have questions answered. These questions could be to do with size guides or your returns policy, for instance. The best way to enable customers to find the help they need is to provide a knowledge base that customers can search for themselves. Of course, there may be times when a customer prefers to speak to someone.
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Provision of a live chat facility
How many times do customers visiting a department store need to seek out a sales assistant to ask a question. Think about offering this facility to online customers. The last thing you want is for a customer to be making a purchase only to encounter difficulties when attempting to check out and abandon the process when they cannot find a solution to the issue. This is where the live chat facility comes in. Designing a website that includes live chat gives customers the chance to have a conversation and get important questions answered.
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Interacting via social media
A large proportion of your customers are likely to be active on social media. You should never overlook this fact. It’s important that you design your website to include links to your social media accounts on the homepage. Customers can then use these links to interact with you on social media; they can ask questions and comment on your products and service. Social media can be an excellent customer service tool.
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Why it’s not just the design that is important
You can click this link to find out more about optimising your website for customer service, but it’s not just about the design. There is no point in having a live chat facility if it takes twenty minutes for an agent to become available. There is also no point in providing links to social media accounts if you do not monitor them and provide prompt responses to questions and comments. Great design does not provide excellent customer service unless you provide the resources to back it up.
Hopefully, you can see how important it is to place customer service at the forefront when designing your website. You want customers to have a trouble free experience when they visit your website and it’s up to you to provide the necessary features to make this happen.