Can I contact you by phone?

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No, it is no longer possible to get in contact with us via phone. We would love to help you, but via phone is not the most efficient way.

The fastest way to get in contact is via our online support system: click on Info & Support, then select Contact and click on Support tickets.

Why is there no longer phone support?

The decision to only offer support via tickets has been made after experimenting with different kinds of support. As EasyWebshop grew, it was no longer possible to answer all phone calls from our customers. An employee can in fact only take one phone call at a time. Therefore, we started looking for ways to provide telephone support on a large scale.

The success of EasyWebshop is largely due to our low prices. For a period we offered priority support for a fee, but experience shows that customers do not want to pay extra for support.

Support should therefore be free, but the training of staff takes time and costs money. In addition, EasyWebshop is a very comprehensive package, so going through a question structure is no option. The customer wants to contact someone who understands his or her question and can solve it. Employees must therefore be highly educated, technically minded and communicative.

The training lasts approximately one year. In periods of strong growth, it is impossible to train employees on time, so the demand can not be met.

In addition, support staff are hard to find on the Belgian labor market: highly trained technicians are scarce and therefore expensive. To properly address the telephone support we have to increase our prices, but we absolutely want to avoid this! We have already seen many webshop providers go bankrupt due to high rates. To compete internationally we keep our prices low.

For example, a basic shop costs €3,95 per month. The margins are very low on this: when a customer calls for a minute, this really means that we are losing money.

We considered a premium rate number, but this does not work: it creates dissatisfaction and frustration among customers, especially when they are placed in a queue. We also experimented with outsourcing phones to external call centers. Unfortunately, this was at the expense of quality: customer inquiries were not (correctly) answered with dissatisfaction as a result. In addition, this service in Belgium was particularly pricey. Alternatives abroad could not convince us of the quality that our customers expect from us.

Many telephone inquiries are beginners questions: they require much explanation that we have to repeat again. Therefore, we have summarized and included the most frequently asked questions. You can listen to them by calling our telephone number. The available languages are English, Dutch, Spanish, German and French.

Our research on companies that carry out telephone support on a large scale, showed that customers are generally dissatisfied. We ourselves have had many satisfied customers on the phone and there was only a small group that we could not help or were unrealistic in their demands. Unfortunately, especially this last group places negative comments on social media and internet forums. Telephone support is a mentally demanding job with little reward, but with major negative consequences if an employee accidentally makes a mistake.

For these reasons we have decided to no longer offer telephone support and to focus on a sound and scalable alternative: support tickets.

The benefits of support tickets

  1. Fast and efficient service - with prescribed answers we can answer common beginners questions quickly.

  2. Security - after logging in, a support ticket gets attached to the shop. A malicious person could not request adjustment without having to log in.

  3. No waiting on the phone - customers can do something else while they wait for an answer.

  4. Overview - we immediately have access to all customer information including orders and previous contact.

  5. Delegating - we can forward questions to the person who can give the best answer, even if that person is not available at that time.

  6. Possibility of working with priorities - customers with few questions are given priority to customers who contact us every day.

  7. Visual aid - complex issues such as links with payment providers we can explain by means of screenshots and diagrams.

  8. Scalability - because of the efficiency, we can answer many questions with just a handful of employees. So we can maintain our low rates.

Some questions may be better explained by phone, in which case we call the customer ourselves.

Alternative methods of support

Email
Initially we provided support by email. Unfortunately, we received so much spam after some time that we missed emails from our customers. The spam was due to our email address included in the address books of our customers. These address books often get in the hands of spammers after a computer has been hacked. Furthermore, it was difficult to link the question to a webshop, because the customers did not always send the email from the email address linked to their webshop.

Webshop courses
The most pleasant way (for us) to provide support, is face-to-face. We regularly give courses with question moments for our customers. Unfortunately, this is a great investment and we always reach only a small part of our customers.

Social media
It is impossible to efficiently answer the customer inquiries on a large scale in this manner. It is also unclear which profile on the social network is linked to which shop. Because of this, security can not be guaranteed.

Frequently Asked Questions



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