Customer Service And Web Design – Case Study Part 1
Oct. 31, 2011 12:18 PM posted by: GuillermoNowadays, most business owners understand how important providing superior customer service is. One critical but often underestimated aspect of this is making sure that your website is the ‘superior customer service window’ to your business that it should be.
Almost without exception, it doesn’t matter how good your site is, it could always be better. In this short customer service series, I’m going to demonstrate how your site might be improved with a case study based on a site that is owned by a friend of mine at Space-Design-Solutions.com. I recommend you think about how these ideas fit in with your own online presence.
Here’s how the site opens in my browser window:
It’s attractive and the color combinations work well, but there are several things that immediately strike me about this page if I’m looking at it from a customer service point of view.
Okay, so there are several link buttons across the top of the page, one of which is takes the visitor to the ‘Contact Us’ element of this page (at the bottom). Apart from the fact that this information should not be at the bottom of the homepage (for reasons that I’ll explain in more detail later), my question is, ‘Why are you asking a potential customer to click a link to contact you?’
You have made it just that little bit more difficult for them to get in touch with your company to do business with you. Providing superior customer service is all about making it as easy as possible for potential customers to get in contact with you, and yet this is doing exactly the opposite.
What I’d therefore do is place a telephone number and postal address at the top right of the page after moving the couple studying the drawing down a little.
This is crucial because in terms of providing a superior service to your customers, you must realize that potential customers in your local market expect to buy offline, not online. They therefore expect to call and perhaps visit you, so you should make it as easy as possible for them to do so.
It hardly needs mentioning that providing top quality customer service is all about giving potential clients what they want. For this reason, I would definitely recommend putting the telephone number and address at the top of the homepage.