Are Your Customers Your Business?

By Author: Val Burnett
Total Articles: 1
Comment this article

Are YOUR customers YOUR business?

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!
About the Author Be sure to check out Val's ebook
Don't Wake Me Up! I Am Making Money!
http://www.successgroundzero.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
--------------------------------------------------