Assistant on an hourly rate ?

[burt]

If you hired someone to handle your customers - ensuring every single buyer feels valued, checking in to see if they're happy, and staying top-of-mind so they come back for more - what would that cost you in hourly wages? £$E20/hour? £$E30/hour?

At some point, hopefully your business will be doing enough volume to warrant hiring that assistant. But until then, how many hours a week are you currently spending on these tasks yourself?

I’m trying to understand how everyone here is handling their customer care/retention and what you're currently paying (in either time or cash) to make sure your customers don't just buy once and disappear.

[burt]

The lack of replies is actually a pretty telling answer in itself! Hopefully you're all too busy manually processing follow-ups, tracking orders in spreadsheets, and chasing down customers to spend a minute on the forum.

It's something we should be looking at in Core, I think: store owners buried in the "manual labour" of running their business that they don't have time to even talk about how to fix it.

I'm working on some new ways to handle multi-step sequences natively so you can maybe get some of that time back. If you ever do come up for air , I'd love to hear what specific outreach sequence (like a 30-60-90 day check-in) you'd automate if you could do it for free.

Until then, ¡Hasta la vista, y vamos!

[azpro]

If you hired someone to handle your customers - ensuring every single buyer feels valued, checking in to see if they're happy, and staying top-of-mind so they come back for more - what would that cost you in hourly wages? £$E20/hour? £$E30/hour?

At some point, hopefully your business will be doing enough volume to warrant hiring that assistant. But until then, how many hours a week are you currently spending on these tasks yourself?

I’m trying to understand how everyone here is handling their customer care/retention and what you're currently paying (in either time or cash) to make sure your customers don't just buy once and disappear.

Maybe no replies to your question because shopowners are struggling and have no time to answer ... For me - handling customers requests / processing orders / telephone answering / update website / customer care are kind of the same and is a full-time job - day in - day out .... and evenings ... So there could be more automation but I don't realy want it .... I even prefer manual updates over automated price-updates. For a relatively small-business with no exclusive goods - to survive IMHO personal REAL service is critical. Also in the times I was working with 6+ persons I was allways convinced all the different tasks must/should be done by a single person - so customer care / order processing / purchasing / product base maintenance etc. etc .. No small tasks - a general approach for everyone, So you answer the phone - customer has a question - you put the answer in the text on the website. Question about availability? You update the product page ... etc.etc. Every employee should be able to run the daily business. And for a customer it should not make a difference who and how he contacts. We allways track/store each contact - so everyone can answer a follow-up call or mail.

Just my take but I hope it makes sense ........ off topic - (or not) better import and export CSV / XML (for products - but also customers - orders etc.etc) might help for Phoenix to even become a better e-com solution.

[bonbec]

For me, the question doesn't arise because of my company's status: I'm not allowed to have employees.
That's why I want as many automated features as possible in PhoenixCart to reduce tedious, time-consuming tasks that aren't productive (I sell what I produce).

[burt]

TY for posting, both

You're totally right - one way a small shop owner can beat the likes of Amazon is with that personal touch. 110%. But surely, there are some tasks you could automate?

I think (though I’m not certain) most business owners would want to hand off certain things to automation. That frees up time to focus on the more interesting parts of running the business.

Fred’s post is closer to how I see it: automate the small stuff, save 10-20 minutes a day. That’s about 2 hours a week. Over a year, 100 hours or 4 days worth of time! It does adds up...

That's 4 extra days you can spend on giving your customers even better service!

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I'm certain that every shop owner does at least one thing on a regular basis - daily, weekly, even monthly - that could be automated. The hard part for me is figuring out what that one thing is, since I'm not looking over your shoulder. I can only go by the feedback and posts I see here.

And just to be clear - these automated tasks don't have to be customer-facing at all. I asked the question in the original post as I am working on something that makes sense with regards to customers.

Automaton could be things like currency updates or backing up your database.

Here are a few more non-customer examples of maybe automate:

- Resizing and renaming product photos in bulk
- Generating daily or weekly sales reports
- Syncing stock levels between your shop and any other platforms (eBay, Etsy, etc.)
- Sending yourself low-stock alerts
- Auto-posting new products to social media
- Batch printing invoices or packing slips

That's a few. If we did include customer facing things, then there would be loads more to debate, eg all the Queued Email stuff, we have just the tip of the iceberg on that system. There is so much more.

[azpro]

To clarify - I am not saying you can't automate - on the contrary you should. There is lots of it - but for me it is crucial not to loose the personal touch.

That having said - I will make a list of required ( ) tasks when I have time (all tied up now IRL) .. But probably they all involve importing/exporting in essence ... I have been working on a good interface but never really achieved a ready product - In the sence iet is versatile with mapping etc.