No man is an island, so they say.
It’s impossible for any online business, let alone one with software as a service business model, to exist without various services and tools. Some of the popular ones are new. Some are with us for decades and became a pure necessity (e.g. grandma Domain and grandpa Hosting.)
The most common and the most irritating error message when you accept credit card payments in your online business: “Transaction rejected by credit card company”.
You may like it or not, but you will have chargebacks in your web business. I’m sure about that.
The role of the customer service in building trustworthy online business is often underestimated. The merchants looking for online payment solutions often do not consider dealing with customers’ queries a necessity or treat it as a marginal issue. However, hiring and training your customer support service would help you on many different levels of communication with customers. It would also establish your company’s credibility and make your company worth recommending to others. What’s more, it will boost your sales.
Whenever we’re explaining one-click payments to our partners or clients, it’s always good to add the “just like Amazon or Apple” phrase. In most cases it says more than any detailed description would and there’s always the “big brand effect”. Of course one of the greatest advantages of one-click payments is that this solution is fast and convenient. That’s why when making a purchase, I was a bit surprised that Apple asked me to provide additional specific documents in order to prove my identity. But, as I wrote recently, confirming my identity is completely understandable in some cases. What struck me was the way it was handled.
Before I tell the story, I have to clearly state that this was a local Apple department (not the US Apple), but after some googling it looked like the same department contacts also, for example, UK customers. We also do not intend to mock or criticize Apple – we just want to present an interesting case study and an example that even really big brands either make mistakes or sometimes do not fully control their representatives.