Andy’s comment raised some great points. As a designer, I’m emailing clients constantly throughout the day, calls being reserved for project initiation, briefing or project milestones. Maybe there’s some merit in calling clients more often to resolve problems in one sweep and maintain facetime or “voicetime” with the client. Sometimes we can go weeks without actually talking to a client directly.

You might be interested to take a look at a business that could do with reading this post by checking out a public forum in Ireland – through which this company has chosen to maintain contact with customers (though they have a phone contact, many complaints state it is never answered). The site is Boards.ie, going to “Biz”, then “Talk To” and “Komplett” … this business used to be great but was recently sold and whatever policy changes happened after this sale, well, their customer support has gone down the tube. The various problems suffered by customers are played out daily on that forum. Pretty crazy stuff and I know many techies who won’t buy from them anymore because of this poor customer service. A great shame since the company used to be fantastic and I’ve bought a lot off them previously.

You stated that the companies preferred method of contact is over the phone as: “it is the quickest way customers could get their problems resolved”.

Working within a central web team at a large organisation, we have also found that talking to our clients in person (either by phone or arranging a meeting) produces much better results than communicating by email or a ticketing system. We have a devolved approach to building websites (through a CMS), where we provide advice and guidance to clients, who then do the leg work, after which we review and sign-off the site. As with any job, there is a need for revisions. In the past this resulted in endless emails back and forth debating the merit of various corrections. This proved to be a considerable time sink.

We have found that by spending an hour or two up front with the client explaining the process (instead of just pointing them at the guidelines) and really finding out what their needs are, we reduce the number and severity of errors that crop up during the review process. It also gives our clients a better understanding of what we are trying to achieve through the review, and they are less likely to object to having to make revisions. By improving our customer service we can considerably reduce the amount of time we need to spend on a project and the better service enhances our teams reputation.

Email may allow you to fire off a quick response, but it’s not really effective in the longer term if you then have to spend hours clarifying what you said.

These days I work a lot with customer comments from surveys embedded in ecommerce ‘thank you for your order’ pages, and they demonstrate to me the power of building customer loyalty through excellent service. Loyal customers will fight their way through broken checkouts, or come back another day if the site is down!

If you want to justify this approach in business terms it’s vital to calculate the REAL cost of acquiring a customer and also the expected lifetime value of the customers you acquire through different channels.

You should always have these two figures in mind.

This approach will help you get a more structured understanding of the longer term profits in getting the service level right.

as a designer, i really stress the importance of customer service focusing on the web site user just as much as if a customer who walked in the door. most companies don’t really care though and will only talk to a customer when they have too!