Bill McRea

Get paid to share your links!

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.

Related Articles

1. Do It Yourself Solar Panels for Home-Cheapest Do It Yourself Solar Panels for Home …
2. Challenge Yourself with a Camping and Snowmobile Experience …

Trackbacks

1. The Reasons You Need To Start Watching Movies Online …
2. Customer Service and SERP …
3. The Secrets to a High Income Home Business Online Revealed …

Get paid to share your links!

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.

Related Articles

1. [WATCH]: Reloading Ammo - A Time Lapse Journey..... …
2. Internet Marketing Money: Absolute Beginner's Guide to eBay (3rd Edition) …

Trackbacks

1. Can Fiverr Help You? …
2. Having a Successful Product Launch …
3. A Bloggers Overview of The Expert Wordpress Product …

Get paid to share your links!

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.

Related Articles

1. Cell Phones: Jitterbug J Cell Phone (Red) …
2. [WATCH]: Creating Success in Network Marketing …
3. Internet Marketing Money: Absolute Beginner's Guide to eBay (3rd Edition) …

Trackbacks

1. Get Long Term Results By Applying Off Page SEO …
2. How To Get Targeted Twitter Followers …
3. The Network Marketers Guide To Overcoming Rejections …

Get paid to share your links!

Many people in affiliate programs seem to think they can stop working once the sale is made. Remember, as an Affiliate, your success is dependent upon your downline’s success. Don’t end your involvement with the close of the initial sale but stay involved with your downline, coaching and mentoring them.

People joining affiliate programs tend to have big dreams, but sometimes they fail anyway.

Reasons Why People Fail to Become Successful Affiliates:

There are three main reasons why people fail to adapt to change, especially technological change:

1. Lack of Skills
2. Lack of Knowledge
3. Fear

Adopt the “Coach” Role & Mindset:

If you adopt the mindset of a “Coach,” you can dramatically improve your Downline’s performance along all three lines.

When someone joins an affiliate program there is generally a fairly big learning curve to overcome – new product(s) such as the just-released MaxPro System, new technology, and virtual relationships, all of which are especially problematic if your new recruit is a novice in the world of internet marketing (or marketing in general).  There’s so much to learn when you first start as an internet marketer: new jargon, tools and techniques, plus you have to learn the product itself.

New recruits can get very frustrated til they’ve mastered everything they need to learn, if you don’t help them through that initial learning curve.  In fact, it can become so frustrating that many of these new affiliates will simply drift away, and never do anything to add to your bottom line.

Wouldn’t you be a lot better off to spend a little time with your new Downline members helping them to get off to a good start.  Take the initiative to help your recruits learn about your products, technical support and other resources available to them.

You’ll also need to spend time helping them learn how to market in this new Web 2.0 world of internet Blogs and Social Communities, which are new to many people.

Don’t just sit around waiting for your downline to contact you for help, take the initiative and offer them help, especially at the beginning of your relationship with them.  Fear is a major obstacle, especially buyer’s remorse – your personal involvement will go a long way to overcoming your new recruit’s fear.

Coaching is realy just an attitude and a desire to build up the other person coupled with proactive behaviors on your part.  You will gain substantially from this small investment of your time and your commitment to be a Coach for your Downline team members.

A very good place to start for gleaning all the rest of the education about internet marketing that they’ll need is to have them enroll in the Online Success for Beginners course.

Related Articles

1. PD residents want parking coupons sold at petrol stations and 24-hour stores …
2. Dog Training Tips : How to Show a Dog Love …
3. Computer training classes for seniors to begin March 18 …

Trackbacks

1. If you're starting or expanding a small business: make sure you prepare a Business Plan. It's your roadmap to success …
2. Killswitch Holy Diver Guitar Cover Vince & -RoB- …
3. Webify Your Business: Internet Marketing Secrets for the Self-Employed …