Customer search
This tour is following the flow of the Video Demo's which is a more complete account. If you are not visually impaired or hearing impaired then viewing the videos would be a better way to continue the tour. Video demos.
The "Customer Search" page is probably one of the more important pages on the site. As an eBay sellers you are particularly vulnerable if you deliver a bad customer experience. When a customer calls with a query you want to be able to solve their problem as quickly as possible. In an ideal world there would not be a need for a customer to call up with any queries, but there are going to be some calls, regardless of how good the service is.
That is why it is important to find the customer's details as quickly as possible, so that your Customer Services Representative can deal with any problems in a quick and efficient manner. On every admin page there is the admin bar at the top of the page with a link to the "Customer Search" page. When the page has loaded it automatically places a cursor in the search box ready for you to start typing, and you will have a page that looks something like this:-
There is quite a bit of text before the search box, which I will reproduce here for any partially sighted readers.
Please enter details for the customer in the box below. The search box takes post code, email address, first name and surname. You do not need to enter all this information, just what you know. The most efficient way to find a customer is by using the post code. When you find the customer you require you can use the arrow keys to select the entry and press enter to see that customers details. Alternatively you can click on the customer's details. Only the first 10 results are shown, if there are more than 10 results you will be informed, you should then enter more information if you cannot identify the required customers.
The text is pretty self explanatory, although it is directed at the Staff, and therefore does not mention how the customers are listed. We have assumed that more often than not you will be looking at the customer details of a customer who has ordered recently. Therefore all customers that match a search are listed in the order of which customer has ordered most recently. That is to say, a search by the first half of a post code will generally display the correct customer at the top of the list.
The page increases efficiencies by using "AJAX" technology. You do not press enter when you have entered your search details. It will perform a search as soon as you finish typing. The benefit is that the process is much quicker, and the system has been tested on a moderate power server with 450,000 customers to search, without any noticable drop in performance.
So after typing "s11" in the search box on the development site we get the results below:-
It is a simple matter then to either point and click, or use your cursor keys to select the required customer and press enter.