This article is part of the Secrets of Creating and Growing an Online Business series. All week you will find articles that demystify what’s involved and what the secrets are to success.

Having clients is a great thing, but you must be able to provide support for your product or service to keep them happy. Rather than seeing this as a burden and extra expense, you should look at this as an opportunity to best the large corporations who still haven’t figured out that outsourcing to giant offshore call centres with long hold times is not the way to help a customer. I’m going to share some strategies on how to pull this off without setting unrealistic expectations or going crazy in the process.

This article assumes that you are a fairly typical small online business owner with minimal or no staff. In short you are the one providing the majority of support in between the million other business related tasks you have and possibly part or fulltime work elsewhere. If you are large enough to have a dedicated support person then my only plea is that you train them in your product and provide enough authority to actually fix something.

Establishing How Support is Provided

I favour using e-mail whenever possible for support communications and I encourage it highly on my sites. E-mail provides tremendous advantages since it can be answered in many more situations than a phone (think meeting, lecture, bus, noisy mall) and doesn’t require you to stop in your tracks to pick it up immediately. The net result is that if you are properly organized and have an internet-enabled PDA, it’s actually easier to respond quickly to support inquiries. E-mail also removes issues with poor connections (quite frequent with the advancement of cell phones), difficult to understand accents, and gives you time to think about the problem before responding.

I wouldn’t recommend removing the phone number entirely as having it listed has a positive effect on customer confidence and sometimes it’s reasonable for someone to wish to call you. I like to include it on the bottom of the support form, and make note that regular inquiries will be handled faster through e-mail. Don’t have a support number that can’t be found - certain large companies do this and the customer response is overwhelmingly negative. I wonder why.

Leverage the Personal Touch

Dealing with a product or service issue can be extremely frustrating when a call centre is involved. Waiting on hold, being transfered to three different people, and having to constantly retell your story gives plenty of reason to avoid contacting support. As a small company you have a chance to change this by providing personalized support. Knowing who your customers are, how they use your product, and remembering what their past issues were makes it possible to respond effectively to support queries with minimal annoyance for the customer. As the owner you have the actual authority to solve a clients problem by providing creative solutions that would normally be disallowed by a strict support script.

One mistake that small online business owners make (I’ve made it too in the past) is robbing themselves of this personal touch by trying to sound like a big corporation. Yaro Starak writes about this problem in greater depth.

24/7 is for Convenience Stores

When I first found myself in a situation where I had to regularly answer support issues I was determined to provide the fastest response times I could. I would always answer e-mails as soon as I received them, often interrupting other work and throwing myself offtrack. I would even answer e-mails in the middle of the night if I happened to wake up. The support times were indeed great, but this strategy completely interrupted anything else I was working on and set unrealistic expectations in customers for future support queries. It also contributed to much unnecessary stress. I have since discovered that I can get the same level of customer satisfaction answering non-urgent requests once or twice a day, as people are very happy to receive the Personal Touch mentioned above.

Depending on your business you may need to work out a different support schedule. Whatever you setup be sure that you have plenty of time to devote to the rest of your business without being interrupted by support. In some cases you may need to be able to respond to urgent issues so be sure you have a way to identify these without being bogged down by non-urgent requests.

Staying Organized

There’s no right way to organize your support system, and how you do it depends on the request volume and level of communication required to solve an issue. You may find helpdesk software useful, but be wary of implementing systems that make it difficult to access support on the go, or which make submitting a support ticket harder. After trying a number of systems I finally put together a simple support contact form that e-mails the issue to a support e-mail address. This address then forwards the mail to me or someone else I have on support. Since it’s e-mail I can deal with support issues whenever I want from any internet-enabled device.

Do be sure that you have an easy way of referencing past issues that a customer has had. I can view past communications simply by sorting my mailbox using the From column, and I can make notes about a customer’s account through a customer manager application that I have developed. I am also sure to mark issues that aren’t resolved with a Follow-up flag (you can use the red flag in Outlook or the star in Gmail) so that a query not resolved immediately isn’t lost.

Minimizing the Need for Support

Support queries should be exceptional issues. If you are frequently being contacted about the same thing then it’s time to address the root cause of the problem by either automating the task being requested, providing the information requested in an easily accessible place like a FAQ, or improving your user interface. This will not only save you time, but also increase customer happiness. No one really wants to have to contact support over something they should be able to do or read about themselves.

Got something to say? Leave a response to this post.

 Get the latest updates by subscribing to the feed.

Semi-Related Posts

• The Secrets of Creating and Growing an Online Business
• Is Your Website a Money Maker or Money Pit?
• 5 Specific Ways to Increase the Amount of Visitors Turned Customers on Your E-Commerce Website
• Web Hosting - An Illustration of the Dangers of No Entry Barriers

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 5th, 2006 at 7:08 am and is filed under Productivity, Business, Startups. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.