It seems counterintuitive that you should want to offer your customers a money-back guarantee. After all, the customer’s money is really what you came for. Once you’ve got it, and you’ve delivered your product, it makes sense that the transaction should be finished, right?

But this idea makes customers nervous. What if they buy the product only to find out that they can’t make it work for them the way they had hoped? What if they misunderstood the promotional literature and come to find that a critical feature is missing? What if they just plain change their mind? We’ve all experienced these worries when making a purchase, and your customers are no different. Your job is to put their minds at ease. Because nervous people don’t buy. They put it on hold and then forget to get back to it. It happens. You can probably think of plenty of times when you did this yourself.

Enter the money back guarantee. If you know you can get your money back, you worry less. You feel less pressured. You have some breathing room. So you go for it. As a business owner, you’ve told your customer that you are willing to shoulder the burden of their potential buyer’s remorse.

This is actually a win-win situation, because if you know that you’ve represented your product accurately, and that it is of a high quality, you can already predict that the vast majority of people who buy from you will not ask for their money back. You have the advantage in the situation: you already know that your customer needs what you are offering. As long as you are actually delivering what you promise, the only people who will ever take you up on the offer are the ones who simply misunderstood. And, frankly, you want them to return the product to you for a refund. Otherwise you’ll have a dissatisfied customer out their talking about all the things your product can’t do. This build up a perceived deficit in what may otherwise be a great product. The moral of the story is that you only ever want happy customers who will tell people nice things about you.

Offering a money back guarantee not only alleviates your customer’s anxiety about purchasing, it also conveys confidence. If you’re willing to give them 30 or even 60 days like we do with our own web software, just to make up their minds about whether the product is worth it, they know you mean business. If you’re selling crap, this strategy is not going to work for you. But when you’ve worked hard to produce a product that meets your clients’ needs, the sales you will gain by using this strategy will vastly outweigh the refunds you end up paying out.

On Thursday I described how to successfully offer web-based support that your customers will love. But what if you’re the customer? Is there anything you can do to minimise your time investment and maximize your gains? As a matter of fact, there are a number of things you can do to ensure that you receive the best support that the company you’re working with has to offer.

• Be very descriptive.

Assume that your problem is unique, and offer up any and every piece of information you can think of that might help the help desk team solve your problem in one go. Chances are, the support team doesn’t actually want to give you any kind of runaround, or to keep your issue pending for days on end while they await further information from you.

I can’t tell you how many people have submitted frenzied tickets to our own support center begging for fast help getting their software back online, only to leave out any information about how we could actually access the software, or even what specific error they were seeing. You want quick help, and the support team you’re dealing with wants to give it to you; your job is to make sure they can do that for you.

• Keep it relevant.

If you need fast help getting your widgets working, this may not be the ideal time to explain how the widgets fit into your business model. Support staff are twitchy and tend to have ADHD–try not to distract them

• Take a moment to review the situation before you submit.

It can be very difficult to keep a cool head when you have an urgent issue that needs attention. But before you submit, take an extra few minutes to examine the problem, re-read your own support request, and make sure that you’ve included a clear, complete description of the problem and exactly what you have done to try and fix it.

Most web software support systems will knock you back to the end of the queue if you submit a second request, so the extra time you take before submitting could save you a great deal of waiting time later on. Also, when you’re feeling frustrated, it’s really just too easy to lose your head and forget about basic things. Ask yourself: Have I fully described the problem? Have I mentioned everything that happened in the time leading up to the problem? Have I provided everything that is needed to investigate the problem? Have I described everything I’ve done since the problem first occurred?

• Make sure the ticket gets submitted.

Some online support systems have extra steps before the ticket is submitted; make sure there are no more buttons to click or windows to scroll through. Most systems will tell you directly that your ticket has been submitted and even give you a ticket number. Most will also send you a confirmation e-mail.

• Make sure you know how you’ll be answered.

If you’re expecting an answer by e-mail, make sure you got a confirmation e-mail. It may also be a good idea to go ahead and whitelist the support address just to be sure. If you didn’t get an e-mail, check the company’s support web site. In our support area, like most, there is a page where you can view your open tickets to see their status and any replies.

Most of these tips come down to the very same things I talked about when explaining how to succeed in providing support. They’re based on the same principles you can use to succeed in just about any kind of communication: try to consider the other person’s perspective. Think about what they need, what they want, and what you can do to understand them. Your communication will always be more effective when you have a level view of the field and all the people involved. You’ll get more done, and will make people feel motivated to help you.

Since we started giving away fully-functional, free versions of our most popular software products with no strings attached, we’ve been fielding some phone calls from disgruntled users of other people’s services.

You see, if you download and install a free copy of our Help Desk Software, for example, the bottom of each page of your support center will have a tasteful “Powered by ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software” message with a link back to our site. To be honest, I’ve actually been a little surprised by how few disreputable vendors have ended up using our free software. For the most part our clients tend to be extremely upstanding members of the web community. But there are a few companies using free versions of our products who have failed to meet their clients’ expectations and have been generally unreachable.

So these hapless clients follow our “Powered by ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software” link in hopes of finding anyone who might be affiliated with the company that is ruining their day. By the time they do that, they tend to be pretty upset, and so it can be difficult to help them understand that we really don’t have any affiliation with sites that use free versions of our products. After all, we only use full versions.

Now I’m going to tell you a secret. If you follow this simple principle, you can reasonably expect that 99% of the people you speak with will love you by the end--especially the ones who start out by feeling and acting upset.

The secret is that people are not barbarians; people genuinely want to be reasonable. The only time that people behave unreasonably is in the face of a situation that they experience as unreasonable. So, let them know that their experience and their reaction both basically make sense. Empathize. Tell them you know how they feel. Say, “Wow, that sounds really frustrating, I wish there was something I could do to help.”

That’s it! That’s all you have to do, and everyone you talk to will feel comforted and taken care of, and they may even keep you in mind for when they need some web software of their own!

A lot of people wonder if they can really make web-based support work for their business. Will clients tolerate having to do everything online, waiting for replies to their tickets, wondering about the response time? Don’t people just want to talk to you on the phone?

When it comes right down to it, web-based support is often simply the most cost-effective and efficient way to assist your clients. But there are some things you’ll need to do to make sure that your online support center is convenient, friendly, and responsive from the client’s perspective.

1. Make it easy to find. If people can’t find the link to support on your web site, they’ll quickly assume you simply don’t offer online support. Soon they’ll be on the line with your salespeople demanding service, and getting more frustrated by the moment. It’s a bad situation, and one which can generally be avoided very easily by making sure your support center is highly visible. If you look at our main site, you’ll see that support is available right from the menu bar at the top of every page, and then again at the bottom of the sidebar. Don’t be afraid to put links in more than one location.
2. Make sure help is available quickly. Any frequently asked questions should be available on the site with no interaction necessary. Clients will appreciate knowing that any questions they have are probably already answered on your web site, so make sure to set up a knowledge base with in-depth answers, descriptions, and pictures to make sure everyone gets the message. If you’re using ActiveCampaign Help Desk Software, you can even set the software up to automatically search the knowledge base for relevant articles before each ticket is submitted. You can’t beat zero wait-time. Another great way to make your clients feel well-support is by offering live chat. Even if the only thing you can tell the client in chat is that “this is a complicated issue that we’ll have to look into through a support ticket,” they’ll feel better knowing that there is a reason they are waiting and that they have actually made contact with someone at your company. And live chat is far more efficient than phone support, as a single operator can handle more than just a single chat at a time.
3. Make sure your clients know what to expect. Make information about the length of your queue and the average response time readily available. There is nothing worse than submitting a support request and having no way to know whether it will be answered in one hour, or one month. So make a commitment to answer tickets within a given length of time, and stick to it.
4. Exceed expectations. It’s better to over-estimate your response time than to under-estimate it. No one ever got upset because the answer to their ticket came in 5 hours sooner than they had thought it would. In our own support center, for example, we promise a response from support within 1 business day. In practice, most tickets are answered within just a few hours. Be sure to pay attention to the newest tickets in your queue as well as the oldest. If someone you just responded to is asking for clarification, it’ll be much more valuable to them to get an answer in 2 minutes than it would have been for someone with a more complex support request to receive an answer 2 minutes sooner. You might also consider using a survey service to determine what areas your customers would most like to see improvement in.
5. Be friendly. Of course you want to maintain a level of professionalism in all of your communications with clients, but don’t be so corporate that people can’t understand you. Let people know that you empathize with their situation and genuinely want to help them. Don’t make people feel like they are lost in a bureaucracy; they will likely find solace in the arms of your competitors.

The main thing to remember is just to approach the situation from the client’s perspective. How would you want things to work if you were in their position? The idea is to offer them a support experience that, when all is said and done, will actually be better than what they could have had if they had reached you on the phone. The web is a truly robust medium for doing exactly that; you just have to put a little planning into designing the right type of experience.