Are Your Customers Your Business?

by Val Burnett

Previous Article | Next Article

Published on this site: July 6th, 2005 - See more articles from this month...

Customer support should be a high priority for any business, whether you are starting up or already established. At MBP Advertising, our motto is "Our business IS our Customers."

Daily, we strive to show our customers that their concerns, comments and their time is very valuable to us. By making customer support a high priority, it gives the customer a sense of trust in our company and they know that they can come to us with any question and we will answer it and usually pretty quickly.

You need to make sure your customers receive the same quick and efficient support. How you handle customer support can and will make or break a company. Too many companies now, concentrate on the front-end sale, but very rarely work at keeping that customer after the sale has been established. If you have a website that focuses on "free" products or services, these customers should be treated the same as if they were "paying" customers.

If you treat all customers, whether paid or free, the same and with respect, you will find these customers will be there for years to come. It is these customers, that will help you establish your company and they will refer others to you and continue to purchase or use your services.

Without customers, where would your business be? Each and every customer support issue, you need to address promptly, honestly and in a professional manner.

How can you handle customer support issues?

There are quite a few tools, software or programs that will assist you with dealing with customer support. The most favorite now is the Help desk system. Many companies are integrating these support systems into their websites.

Help Desk Ticket System

This is one of the more popular customer service systems being used now. With a help desk system, your customer can log a support ticket, they can track the ticket and receive the response they need. With most ticket systems, they also include a knowledge database, this is a place where you can put the most frequent asked questions. By providing this, your customers may browse the database and may very well find the answer to their question, before having to log a support ticket.

All tickets put in by a customer are logged and saved in the database. This is very beneficial, because you and the customer can track what was previously said, what the issues were and just by saving it, it is a place where your customers can reference later.

A help desk system will also help you analyze your customer support promptness but also it allows the customer to rate the service they received. This is very valuable information and will show you if your customers are happy with the support responses and the time it took to receive the answers to their questions.

We use http://www.perldesk.com for our ticket system, it is affordable and is loaded with features. Liz Smith, handles our customer support and by logging into the ticket system, I can see the average response time as of May 2005 is 2 hr(s) 10 min(s) 35 seconds plus she has responded and closed over 5500 tickets since we installed the ticket system just over a year ago. Our customers have rated Liz's prompt and helpful responses 5 stars!

This is valuable information for a company and it shows that our customers are being helped and very QUICKLY!

A happy customer is a lasting customer.

There are quite a few ticket systems out there, you can do a search on a search engine and find a few, ask around and find out what your associates are using. The key is to find one and put it to use.

FORUMS - Customer Support

Another tool that is used for customer support are forums. Forums have a way to bring your customers together in one place where they can report or comment on issues, programs etc. All answers and questions are open to the public to see and this may help another customer with their issue. By displaying comments, suggestions, etc in a forum, your customers have a tool they can search through and most likely find the answer to their issue. By having a forum and letting your members access to it, this could slow down the actual customer support your company deals with on a day to day basis.

There is a wide variety of forums that are available with unique and standard features. Search around, if you know of a company that uses a forum for customer support, find out where to purchase it from, how the company likes it, pros & cons. We have seen quite a few companies with a forum that is provided by Gossamer-Threads http://www.gossamer-threads.com/scripts/gforum/index.htm - it is loaded with features and pretty easy to setup.

Other companies that provide forum software:

http://forum.snitz.com/

http://www.usebb.net/

http://www.wowbb.com/

LIVE CHAT SUPPORT

Live chat support is another affordable and efficient tool for providing customer support and is integrated into your website pages through either java or pre-written HTML code provided to you. Usually how this works is a box or image is then displayed on your website that says Live Support, or something to that affect, when clicked, it will take your customer to your live chat support. Your potential customer can ask you questions right then and there. This may be very helpful in securing a potential sale, or from losing a customer.

Here are a few different companies that provide chat support software:

http://www.liveperson.com/

http://www.livechatnow.com

http://www.websitealive.com/

http://www.realchat.com/

http://www.sightmax.com

There are a lot of choices for software and tools that will help you deal with customer support issues. The only bad choice that can be made is NOT to choose one and use it.

Ignore your customers, provide dishonest answers and take multiple days to answer; You may as well fold up shop now. Your customers will not be there tomorrow.

Your Customers IS your business and the sooner you realize that, the better off your customers and your company will be.

Make the choice and prosper!

Be sure to check out Val's new ebook Working From Home: Achieve Extreme Success Your Guide to Achieving Success from home!
http://www.1-working-from-home.com Val Burnett is Owner of many responsive marketing programs found at http://www.mbpadvertising.com Plus publisher of MBP BizMajic News 38,000 Subscribers http://news.mbpadvertising.com "Our business IS our Customers"