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      INQUIRIES

      Communicating with your customers in a timely manner is crucial to your online success. There are many ways that customers can submit inquiries, this page will explain where the inquiries come from and how to communicate with your customers using WSM

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      Overview

      Communicating with customer and deciding who will be communicating with those customers from your site will be critical. While you review this document begin to think about who would be the best point person(s) to handle inquiries and a reasonable amount of time to give them to respond. Before you launch your site you will want to establish a chain of command for handling inquiries and make sure that everyone is on board for how you will use WSM to manage communications.

      Receiving an Inquiry

      There are three places where customers can submit inquiries. The first is from the /contact.html page of your site. The second is in response to an Inquiry Form that was created for your site. For more information on creating an Inquiry Form and how you might use one click here. The third is from customers clicking "Item Inquiry" on a product page.

      Responding to an Inquiry

      First, you need to know you have an inquiry to respond to. You can set up your Inquiry forms to automatically email, CC or BCC as many people as you like when a new Inquiry is submitted. If you chose not to add an email address you can simply look at the upper right hand side of your WSM Dashboard for the number of Inquiries in your Inbox. To access your Inbox and respond to an Inquiry, you will complete the following:

      Steps

      Complete the following to access the module/area/section in Web Shop Manager (WSM)

      1. Log into Web Shop Manager
      2. Click Inbox in the upper right hand corner of your dashboard
      3. Click the Edit icon to the left of the Inquiry
       

      Form Fields Defined

      Below is a list of each field for the page.

       An asterisk * identifies a required field.

      Inquiry Info
      *Name  The first and last name submitted by the customer.
      *Subject  The title of the Inquiry Form, or determined by the customer if they submit through /contact.html, or Item Inquiry.
      *Email  Email address submitted by the customer.
      Phone  Phone number of customer that can be added at any point.
      Cc  Add an email address if you wish to send a carbon copy (cc) of this correspondence.
      Bcc  Add an email address if you wish to send a blind carbon copy (bcc)of this correspondence.
      Referrer  When customers click Item Inquiry from a product page a url to that product page will appear in this field.
      Added  Date stamp of when your Inquiry was received.
      Updated  Date stamp of when a change was last made to the Inquiry.
      Additional Info Additional information for the customer which will be shown in the inquiry listing. This information is not sent or displayed to the customer.
      Notes Additional notes on the customer. This information is not sent or displayed for the customer. This is a great place to leave notes for other team members.
      Status

      Change the status of the inquiry.  To remove the item from the inbox the Status must be changed to complete.

      • New - Inquires come in as New and will remain in that status until it is edited and saved as a different status.
      • Lost - When a customer is not going to place an order.
      • Sold - When a customer proceeded with an order.
      • Waiting - When you are waiting to hear from your customer.
      • Complete - When the conversation thread is over.
      Subscribed If the customer is logged into the site and is subscribed to the newsletter, or choses to subscribe to the newsletter at the time of completing the Inquiry Form there will be an exclamation point icon. If not this area will remain blank.
      Messages
      Messages  This is the message submitted from the customer.
      Reply
      Email Customer  Make sure this box remains check marked so that the response is emailed to the customer.
      Reply  Type your response to the customer in this field. The email address that will be used to send the email is what is giving in the Configuration for your site.

      Saving

      Click Save Changes to both save, and send the response

      Summary

      It would benefit you tremendously to practice with a few Inquiries to better understand how the experience is for the customer as well and what the emails look like when they are generated. Respond as quickly as possible to inquires and have as many of the kinks worked out as possible prior to your first Inquiry coming in. This form of communication is a phenomenal tool to provide an exceptional customer experience, and should be seen as an extension of your marketing and sales team as well as customer service.