597 – Make it easy for your customers: Tom talks Online Customer Service

Episode 597 – Online Customer Service
[00:00:09] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with Episode 597 and Screw the Commute podcast. Today we're going to talk about online customer service. Now we're going to talk about, I think the buzzword is omnichannel strategy that and it's absolutely going to make you more money, no question about it. I hope you didn't miss Episode 596. That was YouTube hacks. You got to listen to that. If you just watch YouTube, it's going to help you. And if you have a YouTube channel, it's really going to help you. So episode 596 And if you want to find it back episode you go to screwthecommute.com, slash and then the episode number that was 596 for YouTube hacks and today is 597.

[00:01:10] All right. Let's get to the main event here. Online customer service. Well, what is that? Well. It's kind of like answering customer questions and. And inquiries and troubles using the tools that we have online. I mean, it could be email, it could be live chat. I'm going to tell you about that in a minute. It could be messaging apps. It could be social media, it could be chat bots. And I mean whatever else they invent here, surely. Now, one of my main philosophies, and it served me very well over many, many years, is to respond quickly. You see, the longer the person takes to to hear from you, the bigger the problem gets in their mind.

[00:01:58] I remember years ago I called Sears about a problem I was having with a toaster I had just bought, and a customer service rep told me someone would call me back. Well, nobody did. So I called back again and I made a bigger deal about the problem with the toaster. They swore someone would call me back, but nobody did. So. So then I called and I said the toaster was on fire. Of course I lied about it and someone called me back. Well, don't let it get to that point. The customers are really mad at you at that point. They're probably going to look elsewhere once they even if you do take care of their problem, they had to fight with you. So hard to do it then they're not happy and they'll go looking for somebody else that'll take care of them quicker. Now you want to give the customers many ways as you can to get the problem resolved. And here's just some of the ways chat bots, we happen to use many chat knowledge bases that actually work. This is where people can look up and answer to questions and you've got to keep those up to date. I'll tell you about those in a minute. Auto responders. These are one of the most powerful things. If you just make a lot of order responders, given every question that you get about certain products and then people get them automatically once they buy the product.

[00:03:23] Voicemail messages. Now, this is one of my pet peeves. I cannot stand it. And I can't believe how stupid people are to say this on their voicemail. And if you say in this on your voicemail. Well, with regard to this, you're stupid. But anyway, I hear this all the time. I'll get back to you at my earliest convenience. Your earliest convenience, is that right? Well, isn't that sending a message to me? Like, I'm not important. But you are. And you'll get back to me when you darn well feel like it. That's a stupid message. All right, here's the message I have. Hey. Sorry I couldn't get to the phone. I will get back to you as soon as humanly possible. That's what my voicemail message says. And what message is that sending to people? Hey, they're worried about me, not Tom being, you know, just when he can get to it to answer me. So. Change your voicemail message if you need to. Now. With regard to phone and stuff, you can have an answering service, a live one, or you could get a service like Grasshopper, which is you can have multiple phone numbers coming into your cell phone and you'll know if it's business or personal. You can use WhatsApp. These are messaging things, the Instagram, DMS, direct messages, Facebook Messenger and all that. Now you can use, like I just mentioned phone, but you can also offer text as know. Let people text you if they want to. Now the self service ones. Now this is like chat bots and live chat and things like that.

[00:05:08] Well, no, I'm going to take that back. Live chat is a little bit different. But anyway, that would be the knowledge base and ticket system I mentioned a minute ago. Keep it up to date, have people that that don't know much about your business to tell them a little bit about it and have them test it out. Find out what kind of crazy answers that are coming up in your knowledge base that that are just ridiculous. And what are your main things that can't be found at all? I mean, it drives me crazy. I go to a website. I know that they sell a certain product and I. Search for that product and their search box and nothing comes up. Zero, nothing, nada. You know, and then I call them up. Oh, yeah. Here's the link to that page, you know? Well, I shouldn't have had to call you and sit on hold. You should test these things to make sure your knowledge base and your search functions actually work for what people are actually searching for. A lot of the search functions, you can see the queries that you're getting and then you've got to make sure that the answers to those main questions are there somewhere and that they do come up when people are searching for. Now back to live chat. Live chat can do some amazing things, even if you're a solopreneur and you sit at your desk working on stuff all day long, that's a perfect thing for live chat.

[00:06:39] So it's, it's something that you can put on your desktop. And if someone goes to your website and initiates a chat, bam, you're right there, right on it. But one of the things you always got to be careful of and make sure that your live chat service has this feature and you can just Google live chat services or providers. You've got to make sure that if you go to the bathroom or you're not there, that it alerts the the person trying to chat with you, that it doesn't it's not going to say you're in the bathroom, but you could, I guess. But it just says live chat not available, and then gives them an option to email your text or whatever other options you provide. But it is awesome if you're just sitting there, somebody interested, boom, you jump right on. And now some people can't handle the interruptions. But I'm crazy good at this kind of stuff. I don't really have that function now because I don't need it so much. I don't get that kind of desperate questions and stuff. So but we did have it in the past and it was great. I had someone else sitting there working all day and they would jump on the chat. It just we didn't have enough usage to make it worth it, put it that way. But you might. So overall, folks, you want to make it easy to interact with you. You want to give customers and and prospects or a choice of channels to reach you.

[00:08:11] You want to respond as quick as humanly possible. Like I said, with my voicemail. And another thing, you want empathetic agents. You don't want people that are brash and and just not good at customer service. You want people that will say, I'm sorry and I'm so sorry that happened and oh, I know how you feel. Those are all things that make the customer feel better and calm things down or de-escalate. You can't have some brash person that's on there that's like. Tell pretty much what their attitude is telling you you're stupid. You couldn't figure out how to use the product. And now I'm a tech guy and I got to waste my time talking to, you know, that's a lot of the times how it is. So you don't want that. Then you might want to empower your employees to for a certain level of. Response that they can give to people that have problems. Because if here's another thing that's that's related to this. If people have to repeat the problem over and over again, oh, my God, do I hate that happens to me on the darn telephone company all the time. And even with chat things if you get a chat thing. And they typed the problem into the chat. And then the chat thing goes like, okay, give me your name, email and tell us your problem, tell me your problem. And so you type it all in and then it goes to find an agent.

[00:09:43] And then the agent says, Well, hey, what's your problem? Well, I just typed it in, you moron. You. Yeah. Geez, you know, people just hate that. It makes them furious. They just typed it in and you couldn't take the time to read it. Or maybe they couldn't read it. Maybe it wasn't their fault. It's you put the wrong chat software on that, didn't allow them to read that initial problem and then people had to repeat it and they hate you and think you're a moron. All right, so. So don't do that. Don't make him repeat it. But anyway, empowering your employees to give some up to so much money as a refund or send out a free product or replacement product. And all of those things like like for instance, Amazon, they trust me, you know, they got my credit card. So if something goes wrong, they send the new one out immediately and give me like, I don't know, some ungodly amount of time to return the bad product. So I'm not waiting or, you know, I'm not waiting for them to receive the one I'm returning and then they send it. That's terrible service. And that does happen frequently in other companies. Now, here's one of the things that is totally. I've lived for. Oh, geez, Claire. Back when I had my pizza shop and nightclub in the eighties. All right. And it wasn't so much with the the nightclub, but more with the pizza shop, you know, because you make a lot of pizzas.

[00:11:12] We were the only show in town, so we were always making like lots of pizzas. But something would get screwed up occasionally. So I had a standard thing that everybody was taught and they got me on the phone. I said the same thing. And here it is. I say, What can I do to make it right? And then I would shut up. And I teach the other people working there. Shut up after you say that. Just let them just wait until they talk again. And in in 45 years I've been in business and this has happened occasionally over the years in my other businesses. But I mean, hardly ever anymore. But. In the 45 years in business, not one person ever ask for more than what I was willing to give to make up for our mistake. Not one ever. Because people were basically fair. So. So keep that in your back pocket. That phrase. What can I do to make it right and let them and then shut up while that that's all goes together. What can I do to make it right? And then shut up. Let them talk. So if you pay attention to even a fraction of what I just said, you will make more sales because word will start to spread that you give great service, you'll get more repeat business and all that stuff. And, and here's another interesting and I've seen several studies over the years on this, but the latest one that I saw, I forget where somewhere said 75% of people would do business with you again if they got good service.

[00:12:52] And I saw another similar one that said 90% of the people responded that they would do business with you again. So there you go. Like I said, I live this. And if you get in my mentor program or buy products for me, you will find out that I walked my talk because I'm a crazy fanatic about this. I'm waiting right now. It's a Sunday evening when I'm recording this and somebody was having trouble, they couldn't get logged in to their shopping cart. And and it's a weekend and they didn't want to do an emergency call. So I'm just waiting for them to get back with their merchant ID and their name or I mean, their email address. They signed up one so I can help them. Sunday night I'm sitting here waiting for them. So that's the kind of service that gets you, a reputation that makes you more money. All right. Well, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it. Check out my mentor program at greatInternetmarketingtraining.com. And don't forget to download our copy of our automation e-book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree. And there we go. Another episode in the can and guess what? Episode six hundreds coming up. Pretty soon we're going to have a big 60% off sale, not 600% off where I have to owe you money, but it's coming right up in a few more episodes. Okey doke. I'll catch you on the next episode. See you later.