Customer support means being available for your customer questions and needs. This is very important and even more important to have different contact options. In order to compete with big online retailers, you must be able to provide similar options for support (if not more) to your customers. Having contact options readily available will help your customers trust you when they see how easy it is to connect with you.

Customer Support Phone Yea or Nay?

Many new small business owners don't have a phone number on their website and only offer email support. This is a mistake, as many customers want the assurance they can call if they have any questions or problems ordering or have any questions about their order.

If you aren't an established retailer with a name customers recognize, you need to have as much contact information and information about you and your company on your site so that you can show your customer that you are real and you mean business.

So if you are new, yes, a phone number on the site is important! If not before the sale, then definitely after the sale so they can reach you.

RingCentral is a great provider for toll free numbers for your site. They are low cost, and you can set up a greeting, different extensions, as well as route that toll free number to ring to ANY phone at ANY TIME. It's amazing the number of options you get for such a great cost. Ring Central works great for those that are a one person team that wants to seem larger all the way up to a large business with a lot of contacts and extensions! Check them out!

Other Customer Support Options

Email is the biggest form of communication. However, email is also the most unreliable. Not all emails get delivered for some reason or another, and you have ZERO control over most of the technical aspects of it. With some email providers, a simple word will send your email to your customers spam or junk mail.

But becuase it is the most popular, make sure that your email address is available on the site in different locations or if you have one main email address that you want customers to use, you can post that near your phone number in the header or footer of your website.

There is also social communication. If you create a Facebook or Instagram Page for your business, put those links where people can find them so they can like and follow you. Then make sure that you have notifications ON so you can get all their questions and comments.

Another way for communication is a chat on your site. However, for a small business, this is probably not feasible because it will be offline most of the time if you still hold a full-time job and you don't have a team of people helping you. So you can avoid offering this for now, if you cannot give it at the very least 4 to 5 hours a day where you can steadily stay online during customer peak times to see if anyone asks about something.

The About Us Page is For Customers

The About Us page on your site is a big customer support area. This is where your customer learns about your business and why you are doing what you do. Simply provide your business story or why you are selling the products that you chose, if they have meaning to you, or if you are solving a problem for customers. This will help your customers understand that there is someone real there on the other end of the order.

Include images! Images of you at your workspace, or you with the product... you at a tradeshow... you talking to your wholesaler at the warehouse... There are a lot of options to personalize this.

Having all of this open and available communication with your customers is very important for competing with big online retailers. Big online retailers are available for their customers, so you should be as well.