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About the Author
Janet Maccora
Janet specialises in Website usability and information architecture.
Service Your Web Design Customers
Customer Service: If waiters can do it, why can’t web developers?
Building a cross-browser compatible web interface that integrates with your client's existing accounting and inventory packages in order to sell their product online? No problem.
Interacting with your client during the project and making sure they're happy with what they get? Problem!
It's common knowledge that web development and customer service rarely go hand in hand. The chasm between the technical details of software development and the social niceties of customer management is wide.
But it needn't be.
When you're talking about customer service, building a web site is as easy as serving a meal in a restaurant.
OK, for some web developers, serving a meal in a restaurant isn't that easy either, but we can assume that most of us have at least been served a meal in a restaurant, so we've got some understanding of the concepts involved.
Now let's just suspend our disbelief and watch this elaborate analogy unfold…
We’ll assume that the project has already been scoped, the clients have agreed to commence work, and it's time to write the functional specifications and start building.
Sort of like when the customers have decided to eat at a restaurant, and have already made a booking.
There are several steps that a waiter needs to follow in order to serve his or her customers a meal. If we follow these steps when building our clients a web site, customer service can be as easy as, well, pie.