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Automating_your_customer_support
| Automating your customer support...
Copyright 2005 Richard Grady
My regular readers will know that one of the things I highly
recommend doing with any online business is automating as many
of your day to day tasks as possible.
From a personal point of view, one of the tasks that takes up a
lot of my time is answering emails. It isn't just answering
email that eats up the hours - sorting through and deleting spam
and junk mail absorbs a lot of time too. In the good old days, I
used to get a couple of spam emails a day. Now it is closer to
1000 a day!
In fact, when you look at it, email isn't always the best form
of online communication. Not only is there the junk mail issue
to contend with but also the fact that email is not 100%
reliable. Emails do 'go missing' far more regularly than you
might expect. Often this is simply because the recipients email
software has decided that a particular email is junk and has
transferred it directly to the 'Delete' folder. Other times it
may be because the recipients ISP has decided that the email is
junk and deleted it BEFORE it has even been seen by the
recipient! (Yes this really does happen - imagine if your
postman sorted through your mail and made the decision of which
letters you want and which ones he should throw away?!)
One way to help avoid the spam problem when dealing with
customer support enquiries is to make use of a contact form on
your website instead of posting an email address. This will
certainly help to cut down on spam but it still means that you
have the problem of emails not getting to their destination (and
when you have a frustrated customer waiting for assistance this
is not ideal).
Therefore, probably the best option on the market presently is a
full-blown helpdesk system. Setting up a dedicated helpdesk is a
superb way of automating your customer support and speeding up
the process of dealing with enquiries and support emails. Not
only that but if you use a system that allows customers to
create 'tickets', you don't have to rely on email as your
customers can login to a special web page and view both their
tickets and your replies online.
Another feature of many helpdesk scripts is an 'FAQ' or
'Knowledgebase' section. This is simply a collection of the most
frequently asked questions/queries/problems along with answers
and solutions. This means that customers can search the
knowledgebase and hopefully find the answer to their question
without having to contact Support at all.
Some of the more advanced scripts will even scan the customers
support ticket prior to submitting it and then list a few
possible answers to their questions just in case they didn't
read through the knowledgebase before typing the ticket out -
very clever stuff.
These scripts are also very powerful in terms of how they can
benefit you. Just think how much time you could save if, say,
40% of your customer support emails just stopped coming due to
the fact that your customers were now able to find the answers
to their questions automatically.
Having an online helpdesk is also of benefit if you travel
around a lot or if you are away from the office on vacation etc.
Instead of having to take a laptop loaded up with previous
emails from customers, you can simply login to your helpdesk
admin page and all of your previous correspondence will be
online and at your fingertips. It also means that you won't have
to spend hours in an Internet cafe deleting a days worth of spam
at a time just to get to the important emails since only the
important emails will have made it through to the helpdesk in
the first place.
As with most things, setting up a customer service helpdesk is
one of those tasks that is always better done when you first
start your online business. That said, it is fairly easy to
integrate such a feature into your existing set up and that is
exactly what I have done for all of my websites...
Over the next few months, I will be phasing many of my email
addresses out - I simply can't stand the spam any more! With
immediate effect, all customer support issues for all of my
products and websites will be handled via a central Customer
Support Helpdesk.
I am confident that this will improve the overall 'support
experience' for both my customers and me :-)
If you are interested in installing a similar helpdesk on your
own website/s, there are numerous options when it comes to
suitable software. I chose a product called eSupport (link
below) and whilst this is a very powerful script, I am hesitant
to give it my full recommendation since the installation/set up
process was, how can I put this, slightly painful. It doesn't
help that there is no manual for the software which means that
new users are left to figure out how it works by trial and error
or by trawling through hundreds of posts on the company forum.
That said, I am advised by the software creator that a manual is
in the process of being written and will be available soon. As I
say, an excellent and powerful script once installed and
configured but definitely not for those lacking patience (and
indeed, some computer knowledge). If you opt for this script, my
advice would be to get the publishers of the software to install
it for you. You can find out more about eSupport at:
http://www.kayako.com
Other alternatives (neither of which I have tried myself)
include Perldesk ( http://www.perldesk.com ) and Cerberus (
http://www.cerberusweb.com ). One advantage of Cerberus is that
there is a free version :-)
About the author:
Richard Grady has been helping ordinary people earn online since
1998. He writes a free newsletter which is published every two
weeks. To subscribe (and claim your free gifts), visit:
http://www.thetraderonline.com/newsletter.html
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