Providing Excellent Customer Support on a Small Budget ECommerce Articles | May 12 Cheap Fake Football Jerseys Replica , 2002 An integral part of any ... ... website is an ... customer support ... Your online business must be able to quickly respond to ... from ... clients and from exist
An integral part of any successful e-commerce website is an effective customer support solution. Your online business must be able to quickly respond to inquiries from potential clients and from existing clients, and then be able to address those inquiries accurately and efficiently.
There is no other area of an e-commerce website that is as important as customer service and support. If your online business fails to address this one issue, your business is nearly doomed to failure.
Small business owners usually rely on a simple email address or a contact form on their website to direct inquiries. The reasons for this choice are obvious.
Most small businesses are one person operations. There is seldom any need to provide anything more elaborate provided there is only one person handling all communications.
In the event that the site is being managed by only one person Cheap Fake Football Jerseys Free Shipping , it is recommended that you provide your customers a simple contact form attached to a simple contact script which can be found for free in numerous places online. A good starting point is:
http:cgi.resourceindexPrograms_and_ScriptsPerl
This is the recommended method because spammers ruthlessly use email harvesting software to gather email addresses from websites for their spam games. If your real contact email address is hidden inside of a CGI script, then the spam harvesters cannot find your address, thus protecting your email address from large amounts of spam email.
Anyone who is operating a website for profit and has no intention of ever expanding hisher business beyond current levels should not worry too much about expanding beyond a simple CGI contact script to run their customer service and support.
Small business people often find themselves in the mode of needing to add extra support staff, but still being small enough to not be able to yet afford a customized support software solution.
Software driven help desks can be an expensive proposition. WonderDesk is a decent application to serve this market Cheap Fake Football Jerseys China , but starting at $499 and going up to $8499, it can be a really expensive solution.
Facing costs like this, many small businesses choose to try bringing on extra staff and trying to manage incoming messages through various POP email accounts.
While this method remains the cheapest solution Cheap Fake Football Jerseys , it is not always the most efficient. Think about this.
If you have email going to Bob and to Steve --- in a theoretical scenario --- and you have Bob handling sales and Steve handling support, all would seem well.
But what if Bob finds himself extremely ill and unable to work? What then? Now you are stuck with the very real possibility of sales inquiries not being handled until Bob can return to work. So the way to handle this becomes making sure that everyone has access to the accounts that handle sales inquiries and support inquiries. So, you make arrangements for both Bob and Steve to be able to get the email from the POP accounts.
Of course Fake Football Jerseys Replica , this introduces a whole brand new problem. Now, both Bob and Steve are getting email from both accounts. But now, if Bob answers an email Fake Football Jerseys Free Shipping , Steve really has no way of knowing that Bob has already answered the email. If both Bob and Steve answer the inquiry, then your company now looks as if it consists of a couple of bumbling idiots. That is definitely not the image you want to portray of your company. Additionally, you don't want Bob and Steve answering inquiries that have already been answered because it is a waste of human resources.
Facing this problem Fake Football Jerseys From China , it would seem wise to use a web-based email interface. Problem here is that you will have to constantly monitor a web-based email account for new inquiries. Can you imagine the pain of relying on web-based email for the operation of your business? Unless your web mail system contacts you immediately upon the arrival of new email, then you must maintain an open browser window to your web mail account and continually refresh the window to see if there is new email to answer.
Relying upon your web email account for your support inquiries can become very time consuming and inefficient.
The advantages of having the ability to have one email account monitored by a number of people, and having the ability to move some emails to different folders should weigh heavily in your consideration of using web-based email for your sales and support inquiries.
Web-based email had seemed like the perfect solution for the cost-aware business person Fake Football Jerseys China , but the disadvantage of the troubles of keeping an eye for incoming mail seem to eliminate this as a realistic solution to our problem, doesn't it?
I had argued with myself concerning how to solve this problem for many months. I needed an effective sales and support inquiries system without spending my entire budget to get it. But you know, if you stew over a problem long enough and keep your eye to the horizon Fake Football Jerseys , a solution will present itself.
As it turned out, a piece of software I had on my system for quite some time figured into the solution I had been searching for. With the l