The Key Element That Will Make or Break Your Business

When you made the leap into ecommerce, did you realize the importance
of providing top notch customer service, satisfaction and support?
These factors and your ability to deliver them rapidly and
efficiently directly impact your credibility and ultimately your
success.

Too Many online businesspeople assume that because this is a "digital
age" and the Internet is a "digital medium", their customers expect
and prefer to interact with their company via digital, automated
means.

While it is crucial to the success of your online business to
automate certain time consuming, tedious but necessary tasks, it is
extremely important that you know right from the start that your
customers do not belong in that "time consuming" category.

You must always remember that without your customers you have no
business. You must be readily available to your customers when they
need you. You must avoid trapping your customers in voice mail hell,
late responses to emails and phone messages or worse yet no response
at all. Exceptional customer service breeds satisfied customers which
in turn produces repeat business for you and even new business from
referrals.

When you have an extremely well funded organization, adding a
customer service solution to your business is as simple as finding
the appropriate staff to handle the job and then deciding on the
right tool to handle the customer service requests.

But, what if you are a one (or two) man operation. Can you really do
everything that a well funded company with a full-time customer
service staff can do to keep customers happy? Yes, you certainly can
and if you leverage the correct technology, you may be able to do a
more efficient job than those larger companies are able to do.

If you run a company, regardless of size, you should consider
implementing some of these unique tools and techniques to increase
the productivity of your customer service staff.

My small company, Goldbar Enterprises is run by my wife and I, our
affiliate manager, and a team of expert developers. We have been
blessed by much success which we attribute not only to our hard work
and perseverance and the quality of our products and services but a
huge chunk of our success is directly tied to our exceptional
customer care.

We're not happy until our customers are happy. Our business has
become a lot more than a full-time job. We wear several different
hats: marketers, deal makers, customer service, technical support,
and business web site providers.

To avoid extra work, we set up our members only marketing supersite,
The Ultimate Marketers Resource ( http://success.goldbar.net ) to be
completely automated from the start. We spent months working out the
technical details so that a customer could purchase membership,
receive his/her login details and gain access in under 10 minutes
time.

The system works great, but customers naturally expect and deserve
top notch support. Our customers get all the help, advice and
consulting they need as part of the package. We knew that thousands
of members would be difficult to support but we also knew that if we
put our heads together we could come up with a plan to use existing
technology to help assist us with the support and still keep our
overhead to a minimum.

To implement a basic support program, you should have an email
address devoted solely to support requests. This will allow you to
set priority for these requests so they do not slip through the
cracks.

Moreover, your customers, like you, expect to receive a timely
response to their questions. If it's impossible to respond within
minutes of receiving an email, at least get it done some time that
same day. Your customer will not hesitate to take his/her business
elsewhere.

If you know what ICQ is, I highly suggest that you implement it so as
to enable your customers to access your support person when they are
online so that requests can be handled instantly. If you do not have
ICQ and need to learn more about it, visit Mirabilis to download it
free.

In addition to ICQ, your support program should include new web based
tools that can help you to manage and fulfill customer support
requests.

One of these web based tools that we highly recommend you implement
is Humanclick. This tool allows you to interact live with your
customers on your web site. If you are not available your customers
can use Humanclick's convenient "leave a message" function to do just
that, leave you a message.

Due to the number of technical support issues that may crop up when
operating an e-business you can become overwhelmed if you do not have
a well trained, technical staff. If you are fortunate enough to have
a technically sound staff you can offer support on your own site.

If you are not technical and do not have a staff, have no fear, now
you can utilize an awesome service from Expertcity. Expertcity is a
company that offers free and low cost technical support for anyone
right over the web. The service is great and the people there know
what they are doing. Many companies are now outsourcing their
technical support issues to them.

Once you have these mechanisms in place, you should then set up a
call tracking program that you can use to keep track of your support
requests and their status. This can easily be set up using a
spreadsheet or database program.

Many programs may even have templates that you can use to set up a
customized call tracking manager. This is important as it will save
you time and also let you track the progress of requests until they
are completely resolved. The goal is always to strive for complete
customer satisfaction.

If you can develop a reputation as a company that supports its
customers, you will be well on your way to developing a successful
Internet business. The web offers many free and low cost options that
can be easily set up to allow you or your staff the ability to excel
at this very important and integral part of your business.