After an eBay Sale, Customer Service, Buyer Followup, eBay Business

The one thing that your business simply cannot succeed without is customers. That is why somewhat incorrect statements such as “the customer is always right” came into being, and why sometimes as a business owner it may be necessary to lose a little in order to gain or retain an image to the public that your is a good company to do business with. On eBay this is largely seen in ratings and customer feedback reports, and we will go into that more later, but to start with let’s take a more generalized approach to managing and understanding customers and why quick responsive communication is so vital to a business’s success.

Customer types

There are many different methods and education programs designed to help humans recognize and quantify each others personalities – some good, some silly and some just plain bad. One excellent series that was written from a customer service point of view is training about recognizing different customer types by Fred Pryor called “How to please your hard to please customers.” If you can check this out of the local library I highly recommend doing so, and believe you will find it useful in all aspects of your life and not just within your business ventures.

In this training, much as in similar types different human personality profiles are identified and given names and examples of how each might respond to differing situations. The main element of Pryor’s training are that each different type requires a subtly different approach to handling them, and each provides keys to their personality type in the manner in which they communicate, keywords that they use and in the tone of both their written and spoken communications.

An example is the so-called quiet avenger personality who will appear calm and happy when dealing with you but then go out of their way to cause you and your business problems in retaliation for any slight. Knowing how to recognize this quiet sullenness as what it is and heading off the subsequent problems at the pass is a great skill to achieve and courses like Pryor’s are a wonderful resource to help you gain this skill. Regardless of what training you settle on seeking out and learning more about human personality types and how they respond is key to running a successful business for the same reason that being a successful and well-liked human being requires skilled communication: people only know what you show to them, not what you intend.

If you choose to (and I recommend that you do) some resources that will help you to increase your knowledge and skills about human interaction can be found at the following sites:

• Fred Pryor Customer Service

• ProEdge Services

• The Service Quality Institute

• Ken Blanchard’s “Raving Fans” book

• Fred Reichheld’s “The ultimate question” book

• Fred Reichhelc’s “The Loyalty Effect” book

Importance of Communication

In the past the most important thing in business was “location, location, location” as the man said – but since the advent of the World Wide Web and electronic commerce that has become less and less of an issue, and quick and complete communication has taken the forefront as the most important aspect of a successful business. It is not enough that you respond quickly, but that you provide the right level of information and the appearance at least of personal service. People want to feel special and to connect – and the company that can provide that experience will be assured of repeat business.

Email

Probably the most powerful tool in the ecommerce business’s toolkit today is email and electronic communications. Whether via chat or instant messenger or plain ‘old’ email communications being available and making prompt responses to your customers contacts is vital to your image of “being there” for them, a major concern with any online transaction.

In the business world the art of maintaining contact and lists with your customers is called “Customer Relations Management,” or CRM, and this is a skill that many budding companies fail to nuture early on, and find themselves paying for later.

Postal Mail

A good business policy on keeping and tracking previous customer information and staying in touch is always a good idea, and you should start with your very first sale. A simple “thank you” note with the item you ship and perhaps a follow-up on holidays can go a long way to creating a life-long buyer from an impulse shopper!

Whom to Include

Not every customer is worth investing a contact in. Depending on your business in fact it may or may not make sense for you to track individual customers at all – some factors that you can use to analyze and determine which customers or distributors you need to have an ongoing communications method in place include:

• Your customer’s profile
  

• Customer valuation and purchase patterns
  

• Cost(s) to engage

If your customer is a special order or one-timer then reviewing their profile to see what types of goods and services they are likely to need in the future will have to be taken into account to see if they are worth maintaining a dialog with. On the other hand if the potential for sales is tens of thousands of dollars and they have shown to purchase goods such as those you supply in the past then it may be worth investing in an ongoing basis to try and earn future business.

You also of course have to estimate the costs of that communication – if they respond only to ‘bribery’ in the form of being taken to lunch and receiving gifts etc. to their purchasing agents that may be acceptable – provided you will earn a profit and not just fritter away monies that could be better spent on another customer!

The eBay Way

With eBay sales some great built-in tools exist to help you with these interactions such as seller and buyer ratings, transaction scoring and ways to add buyers and stores to ‘favourites’ lists. There is also a built-in “message” center in the “My eBay” that you can and should use to communicate to questions that are asked – just be certain to send email directly to those customers who contact you via that method in addition to using the message box, to ensure they see the response quickly even if they don’t visit their eBay account right away.

It also is a good idea to follow up when an item ships with a tracking I.D. and a request for feedback once the item is received, and if you have other items or an eBay store take the opportunity to point out any complimentary or related items that may catch this buyers fancy.

Keeping loyal customers

While keeping a customer contact list and identifying by repeat buyers which customer is a repeat (and thus ‘loyal’) buyer there is another aspect that you need to consider – mainly the profit margin and return rate on any investment you have with that customer. If you have a customer who spends approximately $100 a year with you then it is well worth a Christmas card or note two or three times a year, but if they only buy $5 worth of goods at a time and your profits are minimal then email communication might be a more reasonable approach to staying in touch – but staying in touch and keeping them aware of your presence is vital to a successful ongoing relationship. Some other practices that just make good business sense include:

Following Through
When you promise something make it happen. Failing even once will discredit you unless you catch it in advance and let the customer know what is happening and provide alternatives for them or work out a suitable recompense.

Trust Them
Especially when costs are high and you have had a few bad experiences it is too easy to fall into the trap of wanting a customer to ‘prove’ themselves before you open yourself to any risk. The key is to minimize your risk without mistreating the customer by having policies and taking the occasional loss if needed to maintain the customer experience.

Give More Then the Least
Granted you can’t ‘give away the farm’ with a sale or you’ll go out of business far too soon, but adding personalized thank you letters or upgrading to a faster delivery service if the customer has expressed concern can go a long way to turn an impulse buyer into someone who adds your User ID to his list of favourites!

Hire Good Help
You and your staff are your company as far as your customer is concerned – if you have to hire help or use a dropshipper service be aware of what they are doing and make certain that your customers are being treated the way that you would want to be treated.

Shipping

A major aspect of ‘communication’ in any online business is how fast you ship, the method you use to ship and track, and whether or not you let the customer in on your strategies. Ideally you will have a day (or two) a week on which you regularly ship and make exceptions to ship faster as needed – identifying these “ship days” in your online auctions or stores is a great way to start to keep the customer informed, but you also should consider using services that have package tracking and following up every time an item is shipped with a notice that the package has shipped and what the tracking number and expected delivery times are.

With PayPal shipping as well as UPS electronic (email) notification of these events can be automated but whether you rely on your service or do it manually proper notification and tracking of delivery is vital to your customers’ opinion of you and your company.

Suggested Shippers

The Post Office is a great resource, and it is cost-effective fairly reliable and close. So why not use them exclusively for your shipping needs? Because while delivering letters and small packages is what they do they do not necessarily do it the best, the fastest or even (hold on for the shocker) .. the cheapest.

Depending on your goods and when and how much protection you need the post office, as great as it is may not be best for you. To help you decide let’s go over a few of your available options and just see which makes sense.

Shipping Options

Shipping from ‘residential’ vs. business locations is more expensive. Mostly due to the fact that large trucks and delivery to loading docks etc. simply cannot be accomplished to a residence, as well as the fact that larger trucks are sometimes restricted from entering residential neighborhoods due to weights and transfer to smaller deliver vehicles are required, at substantial labor costs. This is why FedEx and UPS trucks are smaller ‘van’ type vehicles – it allows them to go anywhere, albeit at a smaller load level then a full vehicle.

Choosing a shipping company

Which shipping service is right for you depends in large part of the types and size / weight of goods you will be shipping. The two basic types of shippers are Freight and Door to Door shippers:

Freight
Freight carriers ship either LTL (Less then truckload) boxes or pallets that typically range from 600 to 1,000 pounds but can handle up to 10,000 pounds OR full truck-loads.

Door to door
This is the carriers more common to many eBay sellers and buyers and is manned by the United States postal service (one of the largest and cheapest if shipping internationally) but include such big names as:

DHL / Airborne Express

FedEx

UPS

These particular shippers are so common ion fact that many websites such as http://www.lawrenceburg.com/packages/index.cfm will track packages on all of them at once.

Whichever company you choose opening a business account and negotiating reduced rates is a good idea and can help save you packaging costs as well since account members normally receive free boxes and packaging materials.

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