Service-oriented retail stores can teach us a great deal about how to improve visitors¡¯ experiences on websites - and how to generate more sales leads. We only need to pay attention and apply the practices appropriately.

Retail stores make buying easier by having salespeople or associates available to help customers with questions about products or services or to help them carry their products to the register. The outdoor sporting goods store, Gander Mountain, is excellent on this point. Gander Mountain stores offer excellent customer service - and achieve excellent sales - by placing many salespeople throughout the stores who will be certain to ask, ¡°May I help you?¡± If a customer has a question or concern or wants alternative suggestions for a product a salesperson will be nearby to offer the information and speed the buying process.

Home Depot has sales associates throughout their stores and offers wall or shelf-mounted buttons customers may press to call for assistance. There may not be a sales associate within immediate view but at the press of a button, someone will come to the aid of the customer. Additionally, Home Depot offers seminars and how-to lessons for everything from floor installation to painting and gardening tips.

These two stores make themselves available to customers to make buying easier while engaging, and even teaching, customers about available products and services.

Applying Customer Service Online

These principals can be applied online to increase sales leads from websites. No genius is required and the technology and services to enable increase sales leads through improved customer service on your site exist now.

Make your site say, ¡°Can I help you?¡± Imagine each page as a department - or an aisle, for that matter. There should be a ¡°sales associate¡± at the end of each aisle ready to help. Where appropriate, visitors should be able to press a button for immediate assistance and bring on chat, your contact form, an email, or maybe even a fax form for a few industries or project types.

You can improve your visitor participation and engagement like Home Depot and offer lessons or hold online seminars ¨C with up to 1,000 at once ¨C with GoToWebinar, the new do-it-yourself Web event service. Try it free! To improve your availability by phone look at the services available all around you. RingCentral.com offers online fax and toll-free services, Via Talk offers affordable internet phone services to help businesses connect easily with customers and, of course, Skype allows customers who also use Skype to immediately call for free (free for both parties) from their computers.

Live chat is an excellent way to offer immediate contact and great customer service (one of my favorites). However, few things are more frustrating that getting a chat rep who is only taking notes to pass you on to the next person. Overstock.com does a great job of handling online chat and they have an interesting way of making their site say, ¡°May I help you.¡± After a few minutes of browsing, an online chat box will drop onto the screen offering a real-time chat service to answer questions you might have about products or services. It is an excellent reminder that they are there if you need them without being too invasive.

Availability is the Key

The most important point is to make yourself available to visitors. They need to be able to contact you quickly and easily - to GIVE YOU THE LEAD. Whether through your contact form, real-time chat, or by phone there should be multiple methods of contacting you which are made available and obvious throughout each page of your site.

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