As business owners have you ever considered how you act as a customer will reflect on your own business? Time and again I have run across business owners who are not the best customers. They are rude, not professional and just plain hard to deal with. For instance I just recently had a customer who purchased a downloadable e-book from one of my sites. I have all products set up to be instantly emailed to customers upon purchase or they are redirected to a webpage to download the product. Unbeknownst to me the website had gone down during the night while I was sleeping since the web hosting company I have my site through was doing updates and the servers were down for a couple hours. This was not something in my control and rarely happens but if you have a website you realize this type of thing happens from time to time. The customer purchased the e-book during the night while I was sleeping and they did not receive it as it should have been sent automatically. The next morning I woke up and went to work and saw an email from this customer. I opened it up and was shocked! Not only did they say they had been working online for 3 years trying to make a money online but they were tired of being scammed by people...then they went on to say that means you and more words were said which I will not elaborate on. The time that had passed from when they purchase the e-book to the time I got the email the next morning was only a few hours not days or weeks. My first instinct of course was to rectify the problem which is what I did I emailed the customer with their purchase and apologized for the inconvenience and explained that the site had been down. Normally I not only send the purchased product but either send more items or offer a discount on their next purchase, after verifying that they did purchase from my sites. This time I was so floored by the rude comments, the words used in the email I did not. After rectifying the situation I started wondering what business they owned. Why? What you do as a customer reflects on your own business! If I was treated like this only a few short hours after a mistake happened on my own site how would I be treated if I ordered from them? Would they offer good customer service? Would I get my product? No wonder this customer never made any money online, if you cannot be a good customer yourself how do you expect to be a good business owner. So the next time you are a customer and a problem occurs with a purchase, remember the way you act reflects onto your own business. Give the owner the benefit of the doubt. Contact them politely and tell them there was a problem with their product and see if they can resend it or re-mail it to you. Be polite! Now I am not talking about repeat problems with a website, or its been weeks or months and you havent received your product. I am talking about the very first time you contact another owner about a problem you have with a product. Ask yourself this question: How would I as a business owner want a customer to treat me should they run across a problem with one of my products or services? |
