Can I contact you by phone?

No, it is no longer possible to get in contact with us via phone. We love to assist you and make it our mission to provide an exceptional support service, but via phone is not the most efficient way.

The fastest way to get in touch with us is via our online support service.

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 with a small team. An employee can only answer one phone call at a time. Therefore, we started looking for ways to provide phone support on a large scale.

We are aware that the success of EasyWebshop is largely due to our low pricing. For a period we offered priority support for a fee, but experience shows that customers do not want to pay extra for support service.

The support service should therefore be free, but the training of staff takes time and costs money. In addition, EasyWebshop has many features, so using a fixed question structure is not possible. The customer wants to contact someone who understands the question and is able to solve it. Employees must therefore be highly educated, technically skilled an be able to communicate with a non technical audience.

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

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 phone calls 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.

Our research on companies that carry out phone support on a large scale, showed that customers are generally dissatisfied. We ourselves have had many satisfied customers on the line. 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. Phone 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 phone support and to focus on a sound and scalable alternative: online support service.

The benefits of support tickets

Fast and efficient service - with prescribed answers we can answer common beginners questions quickly.
Security - after logging in, a support ticket gets attached to the account. A malicious person could not request changes without having to log in.
No waiting on the phone - customers can do something else while they wait for an answer.
Overview - we immediately have access to all customer information including orders and previous inquiries.
Delegating - we can forward questions to the person who can give the best answer, even if that person is not available at that time.
Possibility of working with priorities - customers who have fewer inquiries are prioritized over those who contact us daily.
Visual aid - complex issues such as connections with payment providers we can explain by means of screenshots and diagrams.
Scalability - because of the efficiency, we can answer many questions with just a handful of employees. This way we can maintain our low pricing.

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

Alternative methods of support

Email
Initially we provided support by email. Unfortunately, the influx of spam eventually led us to miss important 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 compromised. 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 is to provide face-to-face assistance. We organize training courses with question moments for our customers. Unfortunately, this is always a big investment and we only reach 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 webshop. Because of this, security can not be guaranteed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions Contact