Customer Service?

How important is customer service in running an online business?

IMO, customer service is always extremely important in running any business. It's always easier to keep a current customer than to acquire a new one.

There are some sites I have purchased from before that have the cheapest prices around, but they have 2-3 day turnaround on answering their e-mails. I am not someone that needs their hand held during orders/asks a lot of questions, but the lack of customer service in that area is enough to make me never shop there.

What if the customer service is incompetent?

GOOD customer service is a must. There are just too many other places to go on the Web to put up with bad customer service.

EXCELLENT customer service will set you apart from the rest, keep your customers returning to your site, and spawn word of mouth referrals from your satisfied customers.

Products being equal, excellent customer service will help build your business. Bad customer service will break it.

With me, bad customer service is par for anything internet related. I generally expect that when I call someplace up, they probly won't be able to help me... nothing p****s me off more than e-mailing Amazon or eBay and getting a canned response back. This leads for me to be easily impressed by mediocre customer service, which I think is not hard to provide at all. Just have fast responses and give a half hearted effort (at the minimum) and I think that will be generally accepted.

Interesting I tested out a new webhost which was exactly what I want until I tried their customer service who were the rudest most arrogant guys imagineable. I would have been a relativley high volume customer and I told them to stick it. We both lose - so stupid

If the customer service isn`t good, then I`m not likely to buy from, or use anything on, the site. It`s one of the first things I check for on a site.

Good customer service is vital - go the extra 10 yards for someone and get a customer for life - and vice versa!

I have a problem with Overture - was hammered by someone a couple of weeks ago - reported to Overture last Wednesday (with lots of detail so they didn't have to do too much digging), still not heard a thing, not even a canned acknowledgement. I'm so angry I'm going to advise many of my clients to dump them for Adwords. Thousands of pounds worth of business lost for O for the sake of replying to a legitimate problem.

If I did business like O I'd have no clients left!

Good customer service is vital - go the extra 10 yards for someone and get a customer for life - and vice versa! Right on train!!

A great example of excellent customer service is the Web Position support team.

They usually take no longer than 24 hours and really make an effort to leave you happy, a thorough response and always very polite too! Impressive for a large company like First Place Software.

This means I don't mind putting a good word in for them

Bad customer service means, 9 times out of 10, I'll take my business elsewhere.

Waiting mre than 4 hrs for a reply to an email is tooooo long IMHO. (As long as the time zones match up!. It is a sign of complaicancy on the part of the business.

No different to ringing - if they don't answer.....same for email - we have a culture of expecting (and knowing that almost always) email to have instant delivery.

Our business has a policy of not treating email like snail mail, but e-communication.