Hi.
Do you sell on Amazon and you are overwhelmed of all the tasks you have to do daily?
I think I have a solution for you.
It's ZonSupport.com.
I made a short interview about this platform with the founder, Greg Reynolds.
So listen to it and I'm sure that they might be of help to you in your growing Amazon business.
Can you tell us what ZonSupport is and what kind of problems do you solve for Amazon sellers?
Sure.
I guess most Amazon sellers who are watching at the moment understand that you need to
manage your Amazon account.
You need to log in twice a day, seven days a week for the rest of your life.
And there's a lot of the detail that needs to be done every day, which really isn't a
very good use of people's time.
You're better off focused on building your business, building your brain, working on
your PPC, trying to work out social media strategy and drive business to your Amazon
listing.
And so the interruption to your day is when you've got people who are contacting you through
Amazon, complaining about a product issue, something didn't work, the instructions weren't
there, refunds are being processed.
So you're getting notifications from Amazon, just the general day to day business.
So we manage that for our clients.
All right.
How does it work?
Basically, the Amazon seller has to sign up for your service.
Is there some commitment?
Is there some fixed fee?
Sure.
Our rates kickoff from $8 a day and that's basically for clients who got 1 to 3 ASINs.
There's quite a bit of setup involved.
Initially, we get limited access to clients Seller Central accounts so that we can go
in and do product replacements and have access to the messages so we can answer queries and
be proactive in emailing out to customers.
We looked for a minimum of a three month commitment.
There's a lot involved in the set up for an account.
So really if clients are going to come on board we need to learn a lot about their product,
their positioning and all those sort of aspects so we can represent them.
So we got a good idea of how to respond to customers.
Because the whole idea is that we manage all of this without constantly froing with the
client to ask them how do you want to handle this?
What do you think about that?
This query came in, I didn't know how to respond.
And in the back end of ZonSupport, there are English native speakers.
Are they from UK and US or other countries as well?
Yeah.
Basically, the fundamental difference we've got to any other service provider in this
space is we only hire native English speakers.
All of our team have been on the planet for a while.
Like me, read over 40, mature, worldly.
When a customer writes in and they're a bit age, you know when to push back or you know
what to say.
So we'll go back and say, sorry but you sound really angry, and then we'll go into pretty
much our template response about an issue.
And often you have customers coming back and saying, no, look, it's okay and then you're
engaged and then you're flowing.
So, basically only a native English speaker knows when to push and when not.
We engaged with Amazon a lot, especially at the moment with all this challenge for clients
who are losing reviews and were raising cases.
Again, you know what to say and how much to say.
I suppose that's our fundamental difference.
All of our staff are either UK or US based.
And when somebody signs up for your service, they get your virtual assistants assigned
to the seller.
There is no way to choose from?
No.
We basically manage clients accounts 365 days a year, no matter what they're doing.
So we take the responsibility of allocating the staff member that we have.
If it's an electronics product for example and there's a certain type of issues that
time in there, we've got staff who are really quite ticky in that sort of area.
Outdoors, children's, products.
We pretty much know how to match up staff and to the complexity of accounts.
Some accounts have quite a few ASINs and low traffic.
Some clients only have one ASIN and are doing an absolute insane volume.
And then if a staff member needs to be away, it's seamless we have a supervisory level
who will take over and carry on running the account.
The client doesn't particularly aware that somebody is away for the day or has a week
off.
I like that you remove the trouble of hiring virtual assistants and any kind of other helpers
in the business.
Look.
We have been there.
We were Amazon sellers ourselves and we started to grow a little bit.
We outsource to the Philippines.
Everything was going really well.
Then the wrong team flight was sent out to a customer, just as an easy mistake.
The customer took offense and came back and then unfortunately, our outsourced individual
back again and the next thing we knew about it, we had a one star review.
It basically say these guys don't care and have no idea what they're doing.
And then we had another occurrence and basically, what we did is we just stepped back and took
a breath.
Grabbed the neighbor down the road who was taking early retirement to help out and it
kind of spread from there.
We had another colleague of ours with a big business started to help them out.
And all of a sudden we realized there was fundamentally a business sitting here using
native English speakers but part timers.
So most of our staff, their mature, they have been around for awhile.
Some are stay at home moms, others are stay at home dads, some are looking out for an
aging parent for example.
So to do a few hours a day is all they wanted to do.
They don't want 40 hours.
They don't want anything near that.
So that basically, I guess how it started off and the flow.
And one more time, could you tell us all the possible services or tasks which can be done
by ZonSupport?
Sure.
The core tasks that we look after is your product replacements, when refund alerts come
through, we get a direct feed from your Seller Central account.
So as soon as a refund notification comes through, we get that as well.
So we're responding straight out to a customer saying, Amazon just alert us about a refund,
sorry the product wasn't as you expected, please tell us why these sorts of things.
You'd be surprised with the number of replies that we actually get in and people still got
the product and they say, well this is the problem or that's problem.
And we all know the last thing we want is for people to send back the product because
Amazon can get it wrong.
Something's broken or chipped or there's an issue with it.
It gets put back into stock and it's kind of rinse and repeat.
The product goes back out for another customer.
You get another unhappy customer.
So if we can engage with the customer straight away, for example, on a product refund and
get them to keep the product and do a replacement, that works extremely well.
Low star reviews.
We also have our own some back end tech ourselves.
We know when clients are getting low star reviews.
We respond to one, two, and three star reviews.
Basically in an attempt to turn them around where we can.
We're using various programs to see if we can find the customer and that reach out to
them and offer a replacement.
And again, this takes old time and effort and probably the worst people to respond to
lowest review is our client because they take it all personally, right?
Some accounts that we've taken over, some of the replies are really, really a bit strong.
We look after all the review side of things.
And then we also have a hijacker service.
We run a search in all the English speaking markets.
In Australia, US of course, Canada and UK.
They were searching for hijackers, we keep them busy, will following up, moving them
off, keeping smacking them all the time with the cease and desist.
And eventually they go and find somebody else.
Because let's face it, hijackers, they drive down your average price.
And so if you leave them there too long and then people get used to your lower price.
Amazon get used to your lower price and I'm sure we've all been through the experience,
you lose your own buy box and that's because the price has been average down and then you
put it off the hijacker.
Your product is there at the higher price.
And Amazon says this has been selling for $2 or $3 less for awhile.
I don't like this.
That's a big part of the business.
More recently, keywords is another additional service that we offer our clients send us
their top keywords, we check those every week to make sure that they're working, that they're
indexing.
Everybody says they do it, but nobody does.
And if you're not indexing, you're not being found for that keyword.
So we have some very interesting conversations with clients who think their business is going
really well, this is happening and that's happening and when we dive and then do some
data analysis for them, it just gives them an opportunity to change what they're doing.
Which I think is good for them and good for us.
Great.
Perfect.
So if someone wants to sign up for ZonSupport, just hit ZonSupport.com.
And as Greg said earlier, there will be a few months commitment but I see it as a very
positive thing because then your ZonSupport team can learn about the client needs and
the style of the client.
Maybe the style of the product and the communication with the customer and the custom avatar and
then hopefully you will be successful working together.
Very much.
I mean we have clients go to burning man, they go off camping, they disappear and we
don't even know they're gone and then they come back.
So it does give people their freedom as well.
Of course, if they will use the link that you're providing, then we got a really great
deal for Orange Klik subscribers.
So please use that link.
Great.
And it is just $8 a day, not an hour a day.
$8 a day.
That's where it starts for 1 to 3 ASINs, yeah.
Perfect.
Thank you very much, Greg.
I appreciate your time.
Thanks.
No comments:
Post a Comment