Help me figure out a customer service system for my website
September 27, 2013 1:43 PM
I have been working for a small non-profit for a little less than a year, and one of my major projects has been to manage a newly created website where we sell our publications. I don't have much experience with website administration, and have learned a lot on the job, but I seem to have hit a wall with coming up with an efficient, streamlined process for keeping track of all of the customer service and order related pieces and correspondence. I figure there must be existing programs or systems that I could use, instead of having to come up with something from scratch, but the caveat is that it would have to be free or at least low-cost. More complications inside.
The two biggest problems are managing the correspondence, and managing the relatively large number of orders that can't be placed directly through the website. Here's an example of what a typical order process is:
-Customer wants to place an order for our publication, but needs to pay by check. They email me through the contact form on the website, which goes to an Outlook inbox dedicated to website emails that my coworker and I have access to.
-I email an invoice request form to my (one-person) accounting department. They email me back with an invoice. I then send the invoice to the customer so they can process the payment.
-Once the customer sends the check, my accounting department informs me that we've received payment. Usually the customer has ordered a combination of online subscriptions and print copies. I'm in charge of activating the online subscriptions, and then I send an email to our external fulfillment center, asking them to send the print-only products to the customer. (I receive no confirmation that the order has been sent.)
When this works, it works well enough, but there are SO many places along the way that things can or have fallen through the cracks. I've sent orders to the fulfillment center that didn't get mailed, and I don't find out until the customer calls to ask where their order is. (This is also complicated by the fact that everything is sent media mail and have we no tracking information.) I'm also new enough that I'm not entirely sure what the relationship between my org and the fulfillment company is, so I don't know how much power I have to recommend that they change the procedures on their end.
It's also really messy trying to keep track of the correspondence. My supervisor wants us to keep a log of all calls - right now I have an ad hoc online survey that I use to record the calls for reporting purposes (so I can show how many calls we get, and what the topics are), but it doesn't help for follow-up.
As for the inbox, my coworker and I have endless folders in Outlook where we file emails according to the topic of the question/complaint. (again, for reporting purposes), but it's very hard to keep on top of who is answering what emails and what's been said. If I am in the customer inbox, the sent mail goes into my personal sent mail folder, not the customer account sent mail, and the same for my coworker. (My IT department says there's no way to arrange otherwise unless we use webmail instead of Outlook, which really isn't an optimal solution.) We went a few months never knowing what the other wrote to customers, until we just started CC'ing the customer inbox email address and moving the messages into that sent mail folder.
Basically, I feel like we've cobbled together a makeshift system that is clunky and inefficient, and I feel like there has to be a better way. So, my question is, can you recommend any software or system that can make this process less painful? Again, free or low-cost is best, but if there's a more expensive system that's perfect for dealing with this situation, I'm happy to pitch that as a worthwhile cost. Any suggestions for any improvement welcome!
The two biggest problems are managing the correspondence, and managing the relatively large number of orders that can't be placed directly through the website. Here's an example of what a typical order process is:
-Customer wants to place an order for our publication, but needs to pay by check. They email me through the contact form on the website, which goes to an Outlook inbox dedicated to website emails that my coworker and I have access to.
-I email an invoice request form to my (one-person) accounting department. They email me back with an invoice. I then send the invoice to the customer so they can process the payment.
-Once the customer sends the check, my accounting department informs me that we've received payment. Usually the customer has ordered a combination of online subscriptions and print copies. I'm in charge of activating the online subscriptions, and then I send an email to our external fulfillment center, asking them to send the print-only products to the customer. (I receive no confirmation that the order has been sent.)
When this works, it works well enough, but there are SO many places along the way that things can or have fallen through the cracks. I've sent orders to the fulfillment center that didn't get mailed, and I don't find out until the customer calls to ask where their order is. (This is also complicated by the fact that everything is sent media mail and have we no tracking information.) I'm also new enough that I'm not entirely sure what the relationship between my org and the fulfillment company is, so I don't know how much power I have to recommend that they change the procedures on their end.
It's also really messy trying to keep track of the correspondence. My supervisor wants us to keep a log of all calls - right now I have an ad hoc online survey that I use to record the calls for reporting purposes (so I can show how many calls we get, and what the topics are), but it doesn't help for follow-up.
As for the inbox, my coworker and I have endless folders in Outlook where we file emails according to the topic of the question/complaint. (again, for reporting purposes), but it's very hard to keep on top of who is answering what emails and what's been said. If I am in the customer inbox, the sent mail goes into my personal sent mail folder, not the customer account sent mail, and the same for my coworker. (My IT department says there's no way to arrange otherwise unless we use webmail instead of Outlook, which really isn't an optimal solution.) We went a few months never knowing what the other wrote to customers, until we just started CC'ing the customer inbox email address and moving the messages into that sent mail folder.
Basically, I feel like we've cobbled together a makeshift system that is clunky and inefficient, and I feel like there has to be a better way. So, my question is, can you recommend any software or system that can make this process less painful? Again, free or low-cost is best, but if there's a more expensive system that's perfect for dealing with this situation, I'm happy to pitch that as a worthwhile cost. Any suggestions for any improvement welcome!
Thanks for the response! To clarify, accounting is in my same office, but the fulfillment center is a third party company in a different state. The default standard shipping being media mail was decided before I was hired; I just convinced my company to offer faster shipping for an additional fee, but our website is also not equipped to take those orders - customers need to order through the fulfillment center directly if they want that option. (This is why I want to improve the system!)
posted by Neely O'Hara at 3:28 PM on September 27, 2013
posted by Neely O'Hara at 3:28 PM on September 27, 2013
I see two issues here:
1) You don't have a reasonable way to keep track of customer issues.
This is where a ticketing system (like, for example, RequestTracker) might come in handy. Create a ticket for each incident, which allows everyone to see the status of an issue, add notes, and pass around between people.
2) You have an ecommerce site that people can't order from directly.
If it's that customers are ordering primarily by check, there are labor costs with that which might be mitigated by moving to other forms of payment. And fixing the ordering problem might help reduce the number of issues that need tracking.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 6:33 PM on September 27, 2013
1) You don't have a reasonable way to keep track of customer issues.
This is where a ticketing system (like, for example, RequestTracker) might come in handy. Create a ticket for each incident, which allows everyone to see the status of an issue, add notes, and pass around between people.
2) You have an ecommerce site that people can't order from directly.
If it's that customers are ordering primarily by check, there are labor costs with that which might be mitigated by moving to other forms of payment. And fixing the ordering problem might help reduce the number of issues that need tracking.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 6:33 PM on September 27, 2013
I have sold things by cheque from a website before. My main recommendation is "just don't do that", but here is how we did it:
The shopping cart we were using (CubeCart) had a payment option we could enable, called "Print Order Form". The customers who selected this option (labelled on the website as "pay by cheque") would go through and enter all their details exactly like everyone else, then at the payment stage, they would be presented with a printable order form. On this form were the instructions to print and send the form with the cheque. Our address was prominent in the instructions (many people emailed to ask for it anyway!). The shopping cart made it easy enough to write "Invoice" on the form if that would have helped, although we didn't.
Anyway, at this point, the order would be in the system and marked as "not paid yet", the same as orders by people who are having a problem typing their credit card number.
When the cheque and order form arrived, we could easily match the order with one of the pending ones in the system, and mark it as "paid". At this point the order is the same as any other paid order and gets fulfilled by exactly the same process as everyone else's.
The minute the order form is marked as paid, it went directly in a folder that we referred back to when cheques get lost in the mail (or down the back of the customer's sofa). If the order form was in that folder, it meant we had received the payment, even if someone on our end had messed up the order status in the system.
Sometimes customers were unable to print the order form for some reason but they were always very creative about creating and sending a replacement, as well as several happy little notes that cheered us all up.
Originally we anticipated problems with cheques bouncing, and we would write the cheque number in the comment field on order in the shopping cart, in order to match bounced cheques back to the offending customer. But we never once had a bounced cheque so we stopped bothering.
posted by emilyw at 3:38 AM on September 28, 2013
The shopping cart we were using (CubeCart) had a payment option we could enable, called "Print Order Form". The customers who selected this option (labelled on the website as "pay by cheque") would go through and enter all their details exactly like everyone else, then at the payment stage, they would be presented with a printable order form. On this form were the instructions to print and send the form with the cheque. Our address was prominent in the instructions (many people emailed to ask for it anyway!). The shopping cart made it easy enough to write "Invoice" on the form if that would have helped, although we didn't.
Anyway, at this point, the order would be in the system and marked as "not paid yet", the same as orders by people who are having a problem typing their credit card number.
When the cheque and order form arrived, we could easily match the order with one of the pending ones in the system, and mark it as "paid". At this point the order is the same as any other paid order and gets fulfilled by exactly the same process as everyone else's.
The minute the order form is marked as paid, it went directly in a folder that we referred back to when cheques get lost in the mail (or down the back of the customer's sofa). If the order form was in that folder, it meant we had received the payment, even if someone on our end had messed up the order status in the system.
Sometimes customers were unable to print the order form for some reason but they were always very creative about creating and sending a replacement, as well as several happy little notes that cheered us all up.
Originally we anticipated problems with cheques bouncing, and we would write the cheque number in the comment field on order in the shopping cart, in order to match bounced cheques back to the offending customer. But we never once had a bounced cheque so we stopped bothering.
posted by emilyw at 3:38 AM on September 28, 2013
This thread is closed to new comments.
As for orders, you need a better system of communications between you, the accountant, and the fulfillment department. I suggest that you merge into the same office as fulfillment and also use a system like Raisers Edge, which your charity might already use for fundraising, to compile information about orders so that you can easily pull the lists and this information can be used by the development department when preparing author tours and so on. Good luck!
posted by parmanparman at 2:37 PM on September 27, 2013