Bill McRea

One of the benefits of having an online business is that you don’t have to deal with a store front, inventory, packaging, shipping, and many of the other aspects of running a ‘bricks and mortar,’ business.  When you sell goods and services online whether they be software, courses, videos or ebooks that customers purchase and download, you will need to provide both technical and customer support.

Technical support:

Technical support refers to the support that your customers need in order to access and use the products that you sell online. If you are selling software, there will be operating system compatibility issues, differences in how certain aspects of the product work in the various browsers, some users will have difficulty downloading and viewing videos, etc. If you are selling a digitally downloadable product you will have to provide technical support for any question that your customers will come up with.

Technical support can be as basic as a FAQ (frequently asked questions) list and an email address, a dedicated telephone number where they can call and get a recorded message and a call back, or speak to a live technician who can help resolve their issue or respond to a trouble ticket.

Technical support staff must also have some basic customer service training, and have some authority to resolve customer issues and keep your customers happy and coming back.

Customer service:

The customer service representative is the face of your company to the customer. When one of your customers has a problem with a product, or a billing question, or a question regarding the use of the product that is outside of the realm of tech support, the customer service rep is the person who will resolve the issue and make sure that the customer is pleased.

The customer service rep works through your trouble ticket system, email, and telephone to satisfactorily resolve any issues that the customer may have with your company’s products or services. The customer service rep needs to have enough latitude and authority to be able to resolve disagreements with customers without the need to escalate the issue to those higher in authority in order to save the customer’s time.

You will discover that your company’s reputation will depend on the quality and level of service that you provide for your customers.  Your reputation will also have an impact on company branding in the marketplace, so having well-trained, responsive, friendly customer service reps with the authority to resolve any issue they are presented with will help to make sure that your company maintains a spotless reputation and maintains its brand integrity.

Both technical support and customer support both play an important role in your company. Whether you fulfill these roles yourself in the beginning and then outsource them as your company grows, these functions cannot be ignored if you want your business to grow and flourish. Technical and customer support are two ways that your company interacts directly with your customers. If their experience is a negative one you can lose a customer forever, but If their experience is a pleasant one you can cement customer loyalty.

Internet marketers can find lots more information about selling information products online when you visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog. Come and discover how you can make money online while saving time and effort by using proven systems and productivity tools.

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As in Internet marketer your business may start out as a ‘bootstrapped,’ one-person, but as your products and services become more popular and sales increase so will your need to provide both technical and customer support.  In fact, if you do not provide adequate support to your customer base your business will not grow and your reputation in the marketplace will become more and more negative as your unhappy customers begin to complain to their networks about how your company does not support its products.

Basically you’ve got two options: outsourcing support or trying to do it yourself. Let’s look at both options.

Do it yourself support

With this model you would include an email address such as, ‘support@yourwebsite.com,’ where customers could email you with questions and concerns. In the beginning this might work, but the more products and services that you offer and the larger your customer base grows the greater amount of resources you will need to dedicate to handling support.

When the single email address is no longer adequate, you might set up a customer support ticket system where your customers can create a profile using their name and email address. They would then be able to open a support ticket. But soon it becomes clear that if you continue to field technical and customer support tickets yourself you will not have time to work with your clients or produce more products. You must decide if handling customer support is the best, most productive use of your time.

Outsourcing support

When outsourcing your technical and customer support needs, you can start by hiring a virtual assistant and training that person to focus on handling support. You will most likely need one person with the technical knowledge and skill to field technical support tickets and another one with customer support skills. But these team members will need to be managed, and if one is out sick or takes vacation time you will have to arrange backup coverage. All of this takes your time and attention away from your primary business functions.

The next option is to hire an outsourcing company that has its own support staff. They hire and manage the people who will be handling your support needs. This is an almost completely hands-off option, which gives you the freedom to handle all of the other pressing needs of running a company. You can feel confident that your customer and technical support needs are being handled professionally.

When you try to juggle running a business, caring for clients, coming up with new products and services while also trying to resolve customer complaints, or solving technical issues you  are spreading yourself too thin. You did not launch an Internet business to be working three or more jobs at a time. When you outsource your technical and customer support needs you free up your time to work on growing your business and creating new products.

Internet marketers can find lots more information about providing customer support online when you visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog. Come and discover how you can make money online while saving time and effort by using proven systems and productivity tools.

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When your Internet business has grown to the point where it is clear that you need a solution for customer support, it’s time to create a plan for how you will develop a customer support department. In this article we will take a look at how a small business person might go about finding, training and motivating a support staff.

How to find support staff

You can place ads online to try to find the right people with the experience, knowledge, and desire to provide excellent customer support, or you can work with a virtual assistant agency that already has a stable of support staff that are already trained and doing that kind of work. They can refer exactly the kind of employees that you are looking for.

Another avenue is to ask your colleagues for recommendations of good support staff people that they know of that might be looking for work.

How to train support staff

As a business owner, you know what kind of support you want your customers to receive.  You are familiar with your company’s  products and services, and you know the kinds of questions and concerns that customers have had in the past. You can create scripts for what you would like your support staff to say on the phone when they are talking to customers, and you can even create short, ‘how-to’ videos that outline processes that they will be guiding customers through either over the phone or during screen-sharing sessions.

How to motivate support staff

For the most part, people want to feel like their work adds value and meaning. A great way to motivate your full time support personnel is to remind them of the critical importance of their customer-facing positions. Their interactions with customers can have a deep and lasting impact on how the company and its products and services are perceived in the marketplace.

Giving support staff goals to work towards, creating high-performing teams that compete against one another for the highest number of resolved trouble tickets can be a fun way to motivate staff. Awarding prizes for the individuals or teams that make their quota each week is another effective motivator for full time support employees. Finally, making sure that each employees is aware of the path to whatever advancement is available to them is an effective way to keep them motivated to do an excellent job.

The role of your technical and customer support staff cannot be overstated. All it takes is one disgruntled customer with a little bit of free time on his hands and he can set back your company’s branding and marketing efforts by spreading lots of bad news about your company and products.  Sometimes dissatisfied customers cannot be pleased, but if you have a reliable, trained and motivated support staff, chances are they can make sure that your customers are happy with the transaction so that they keep coming back again and again.

Internet marketers can find lots more information about providing customer support online when you visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog. Come and discover how you can make money online while saving time and effort by using proven systems and productivity tools.

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When a visitor lands on your website they are strangers in a strange land until you find a way to put a human face on your business.  Although e-commerce has been thriving for fifteen years or more, there are still people who get very nervous about buying online.  Just knowing that there is a contact number for support where they can reach an actual human being to ask their questions and get live answers can make their buying experience so much more rewarding.

How do you know when it’s time to let someone else handle customer support?

If you are a Clickbank vendor who has published a few successful information products, customers will naturally be looking for support whether general customer support, or technical support. If answering these support emails it taking up a lot of your time and keeping you from being able to produce additional products, it is time to consider getting someone other than yourself to handle customer support for you.

Providing in-house support

You can provide in-house support if you have staff people available who can take customer support calls. You can publish the days and times when live support is available, and the times when if people call they will get a recording prompting them to leave a message.  Having a contact number for support does not mean that you must always have someone available live to answer it. When callers reach a recording, it should direct them to how they can use your online support services on your website so that they don’t feel like their concerns are not going to be addressed until they can speak to a live person. If you provide a help desk ticketing system, your contact number for support can become part of the escalation process.

Outsourcing support

If your in-house operation is more lean and you don’t have any staff available to answer phones, you can always outsource customer support.  You can hire a virtual assistant and have your support calls routed to her number, or you can hire a customer support outsourcing company that has a professional call center with operators on the line 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Outsource support companies can provide a rangel of services such as:

FAQ support (frequently asked questions)

Troubleshooting issues

Resetting passwords

Technical support for software or hardware

It really depends on what the volume of your customer support needs are, and what kind of support you need to provide.

If you plan to scale your company, then customer support is a huge issue that absolutely cannot be ignored. Your customers are responsible for your success. How you treat them will play a huge role in your standing in the marketplace and the ultimate success or failure of your brand.

Internet marketers are often looking for ways that they can make money quickly by leveraging their time, but they should never lose sight of the importance of providing excellent support for the customers they have now so that they will continue to attract more customers in the future.

Internet marketers can find lots more information about selling information products online when you visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog. Come and discover how you can make money online while saving time and effort by using proven systems and productivity tools.

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As a Clickbank vendor, your time is valuable. When you create a digital product to sell in the Clickbank Marketplace, you want to launch that product and then immediately go about the process of creating your next big hit. You do not want to spend your days answering customer questions, and dealing with technical questions about the product. However, you know the value of each and every customer, and the goal of your products is to fulfill a need that your customers have, so you don’t want the solution that you are offering to them to be the source of more problems.

Making a purchase online can still be a dicey process for some of your customers. They might still be a bit wary of giving up their name and credit card information online, so they want to make actual contact with a human being so that they can feel more confident about handing over their hard-earned money to a virtual stranger.

Having a dedicated support desk provides a point of contact for your customers who may have questions about your products or about their order.  Offering dependable customer support will result in a higher reputation among your competitors. It’s common knowledge that people are far more likely to complain about a poor customer service interaction than they are to rave about a positive one. So, if you can avoid as many of the bad interactions as possible it can help to keep your reputation in a positive light within your industry and niche.

When you are trying to build positive brand awareness, all of your interactions with customers and prospective customers will shape how your company and your brand is perceived in the marketplace. Having a support desk with staff that are friendly and responsive, and provide capable, prompt responses to customer requests builds their trust and fosters loyalty, which is a good thing for your business and your brand.

There are several support desk software applications available that you can install  on your website for free, and there are some solutions that you will pay for. It depends on the size of your customer base and what your specific needs are.

You will want to assign staff people to respond to customer inquiries, and give them as much authority as possible to resolve customer issues or complaints as quickly as possible so that you are using as little of your customer’s time as possible. The sooner you can get their issue resolved, the happier they are likely to be with the result, and the more likely they will be to buy from you again.

Clickbank vendors should understand that having a support desk for their products is the best way to really stand behind their products and provide their customers with a positive buying experience. The importance of having a support desk is that it can preserve their brand’s reputation in the marketplace.

Clickbank vendors can find lots more information about selling information products online when you visit, http://www.mcreasite.com/blog. Come and discover how you can make money online while saving time and effort by using proven systems and productivity tools.

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