Anyone working in the online auction business knows that without customers, your auction site turns into little more than a content Web site with pretty pictures. Since email is the primary medium for communicating with your customers, improving your email customer service skills will do much to improve your bottom line.
Effective customer service via email is basically a two-step process. Specifically, planning and execution are the keys to successfully managing your customer emails.
The planning stage consists of creating and sticking to a regular schedule. Auctions are a timed event, and neglecting customer email means losing an opportunity to get a bid on your item before the auction expires. Unless you are part of a large auction team that has a designated person answering email all day long, answering your email first thing in the morning, every day you work, is a general rule of thumb to insure you provide timely responses to all your customer inquiries.
Because your time is a precious commodity, and you have other responsibilities such as taking pictures, writing copy and uploading it all onto a server, you can also make the customer service process more efficient by first scanning all of the email you receive in order to get a feel for the day. As you weed through your inbox, deleting the countless number of spam, take note of the general tone and theme of all the customer email.
Scanning your email first allows you to get a head start in organizing your responses. For example, you might notice in your initial scan that twelve of the thirty emails you received pertain to one particular item you listed the previous day. Knowing this helps you focus your attention on the potential issues associated with that listing. You can fix the problem and shape a response fitting to all twelve customers, saving half the time you would have used by answering the email one at a time.
Once you've got a customer service email plan in place, the next step is execution, answering the email. It can not be stated strongly enough that successful customer service implies excitement about communicating with your customers. As such, your first words to your customer, after a greeting that includes their name, should be something along the lines of "thanks very much for taking the time to write."
The second part of execution involves answering the customer's questions or concerns. Listen to what they are saying, and answer their questions as specifically as possible. It's a good idea to have your browser open to the item while you are responding to their email. For example, if the customer would like to see another picture of the item, take the picture, upload it to the server and then tell the customer that the new picture is in place. If the customer asks a question about your description, review it and verify that it is correct. If there is something wrong with the description, correct it. Then inform the customer of exactly what you did. If you do not know the answer to the question, be up-front and tell the customer you do not know.
Finally, your responses should always have a positive tone. The golden rule of business, "the customer is always right," also applies in an online auction setting. In those instances where the customer may be less than perfectly accurate in their assessment of an item, find a diplomatic way to make your point. For example, you might note that you understand their point of view on the issue, however, during the course of your research you discovered X or Y, and that's the reason for your decision to list the item the way it was listed.
Done this way, your email response generally consists of a one-paragraph reply, consisting of a first sentence greeting, thanking the customer for writing, and two or three sentences addressing the specifics of their question.
