How Will You Handle Customer Support for Your Online Business?

  Honestly evaluate how much support you can realistically provide. Don’t offer 24 by 7 live customer support if you are a one-person enterprise. It is misleading to your customers and they will find out. If your online business can only offer live customer support at certain hours then make it very clear on your website.   Make it easy for customers to get to your online business contact information. This involves setting up a page on your website that can be reached by pressing a simple “Contact Us” link. If you are offering telephonic support, don’t isolate your customers by having them descend several levels in a telephone call attendant menu when they do call. When you make it easy for them to reach you, it builds trust in your online business.   Have a frequently-asked questions (FAQ) area so that your customers can get quick answers. This will take some time to develop but it should be a top priority because it will save you on phone calls later. Remember that time is money and each time you have to pick up a telephone to handle a customer issue it is costing you. A FAQ area, once developed, stands on its own and costs very little to maintain. Make sure the information does not get outdated however. Outdated information can tear down customer trust in your online business.   If you use an e-mail response system, make sure you give expected response times. There is nothing worse than writing an e-mail message requesting customer support from an online business only to have this sinking feeling that you are communicating into a black hole. If you offer customer support via e-mail then you most definitely want to set up an auto-responder to answer it unattended. However you can add one more level of comfort to your online business customers if you send another personal e-mail telling the person you are looking into their issue and give an estimated response time. Customers can tell the difference between a canned auto-responder message and a personal message.   Have a discussion forum to augment your customer support. If you have the technical resources, your online business would benefit from a discussion forum where those having issues could search and see if anyone else is having the same problems. Maintaining a forum section on your online business website would require additional maintenance so make sure you have personnel who can moderate and keep the technical aspect of it going.     Service and support after the sale is very important to your customers. Dropping the ball in this area can result in a bad reputation getting spread about your online business. A bad reputation becomes even a bigger problem when internet-savvy users are able to post bad information about your online business across the internet.