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Providing Excellent Customer Support on a Small Budget
Copyright (c) 2002-2023 Bill Platt
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, 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.resourceindex.com/Programs_and_Scripts/Perl/
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 his/her business beyond current levels should not worry too much about expanding beyond a simple CGI contact script to run their customer service and support.
However, if you find yourself growing to the point of needing something better, then please keep reading.
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, but starting at $499 and going up to $8499, it can be a really expensive solution.
http://www.wonderdesk.com
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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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 last upgrade of the ePrompter software, I suddenly realized that the final piece of the puzzle was within my reach.
ePrompter is a handy little application that has always permitted us to check multiple email accounts simultaneously and delete messages as we were finished with them. With the last upgrade of ePrompter, the makers enabled us to have the ability to respond to email inquiries also.
With this development, I have handed out copies of the ePrompter to each of my support team members. ePrompter runs in the background and notifies us through an icon in the System Tray how many new messages are present in each of the accounts we monitor. As we answer each email, we either delete it from the server through the ePrompter software, or if we need to store the messages for future reference, we log into the web-based version of the account and move the email in question to the appropriate folders.
To get your copies of the ePrompter software, visit http://www.eprompter.com . This software is free to download and use, and will be absolutely essential to your low-cost (free) sales and support system.
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You can become a better writer, with the right training. If you are looking to improve your writing skills or learn how to better market your writing projects, visit Bill Platt's website to see how he can help you: http://PlattPublishing.com/ If you are looking to buy or sell writing services, check out Bill's Freelance Writer Marketplace at: http://FreelanceWritersReview.com/
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Top-Level Category: Articles
10 Most Recent Articles Written by Bill Platt
Four Tips For Creating An Effective Authors' Resource Box
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Distributed: 2013-08-27 |
Word Count: 1669 |
Page Views: 8024
| Votes: 18 |
Rating: 2.50
In article marketing, there are many factors that will
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Some people still believe that all they have to do is build
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Word Count: 1399 |
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Visit several marketing blogs or marketing forums, and you
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Written by: Bill Platt |
Distributed: 2013-07-31 |
Word Count: 1025 |
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If you've been marketing products online for any length of
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Distributed: 2013-07-30 |
Word Count: 1229 |
Page Views: 5996
| Votes: 10 |
Rating: 1.40
The basic premise of article marketing is to present people
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Distributed: 2013-07-30 |
Word Count: 991 |
Page Views: 8420
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Rating: 2.43
The theory behind the Six Degrees of Separation is that all
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Written by: Bill Platt |
Distributed: 2013-07-29 |
Word Count: 1191 |
Page Views: 5937
| Votes: 11 |
Rating: 1.55
Freelance writers fill a very important role in today's
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Distributed: 2013-07-25 |
Word Count: 769 |
Page Views: 7578
| Votes: 13 |
Rating: 1.85
No matter where you go online, you are bound to find someone
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Successful Article Marketers Help Readers Solve Problems
Written by: Bill Platt |
Distributed: 2013-07-24 |
Word Count: 816 |
Page Views: 26030
| Votes: 34 |
Rating: 2.79
Every week, I have the opportunity to speak with people about the
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Distributed: 2010-01-20 |
Word Count: 595 |
Page Views: 4757
| Votes: 8 |
Rating: 1.25
Ann Arbor, Michigan is the home of the University of Michigan, a
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place to visit. The University is co-mingled with the city and
greatly expands the cultural places and events available in the
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Distributed: 2008-02-20 |
Word Count: 486 |
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| Votes: 17 |
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Dads everywhere have Sonora Smart Dodd to thank for getting
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Word Count: 718 |
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| Votes: 14 |
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Word Count: 563 |
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Building your Credit to get a Mortgage
Written by: Kamau Austin |
Distributed: 2006-05-11 |
Word Count: 840 |
Page Views: 5360
| Votes: 17 |
Rating: 2.24
You are thinking about purchasing real estate. However, you are
not sure if your credit is good enough to get a mortgage. There
are things that you can do to build your credit so that it is
worthy of any mortgage that may interest you.
1569 Unique Ways To Get A Free Lunch
Written by: Steve Robichaud |
Distributed: 2006-05-07 |
Word Count: 0 |
Page Views: 3622
| Votes: 3 |
Rating: 0.33
Everywhere you turn - T.V., Radio, magazines, or the Internet,
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Distributed: 2006-05-07 |
Word Count: 0 |
Page Views: 3906
| Votes: 3 |
Rating: 0.33
Your novel is finished, you’ve had it edited by a professional Editor, and you’ve done the rewrites. What? You haven’t had an editor edit your work yet? This is a must. There are many editors advertising in Writer’s Digest.
NEVER Reply to an eGroup Post!
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Distributed: 2006-05-07 |
Word Count: 0 |
Page Views: 5157
| Votes: 3 |
Rating: 0.33
eGroups are collections of people subscribed to a
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posts and replies. The attraction of eGroups is
the ability to join in at your convenience as
opposed to the confinement of live chat rooms.
Reasons behind Shoulder Pain
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| Votes: 3 |
Rating: 0.33
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Effective Managers Need To Coach
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Word Count: 0 |
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| Votes: 4 |
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Word Count: 0 |
Page Views: 13808
| Votes: 3 |
Rating: 0.33
When did Americans stop taking responsibility for their own
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High Thread Count Bed Sheets. How Many Threads Does A Bed Sheet Need?
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Word Count: 0 |
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Distributed: 2005-12-01 |
Word Count: 0 |
Page Views: 6329
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During my twenty-three years in management, I dealt with
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Here are my suggestions for muzzling the motor mouths:
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Word Count: 0 |
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Women since time immemorial have always looked for ways to
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Distributed: 2008-02-20 |
Word Count: 486 |
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| Votes: 17 |
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Father's Day started. In 1909, Sonora sat in a church in Spokane,
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of her mother.
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Distributed: 2004-05-03 |
Word Count: 0 |
Page Views: 5645
| Votes: 2 |
Rating: 0.50
Sell yourself, not your products or services. The point we
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marketplace.
Building your Credit to get a Mortgage
Written by: Kamau Austin |
Distributed: 2006-05-11 |
Word Count: 840 |
Page Views: 5360
| Votes: 17 |
Rating: 2.24
You are thinking about purchasing real estate. However, you are
not sure if your credit is good enough to get a mortgage. There
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worthy of any mortgage that may interest you.
7 Tips to Hiring a Good DJ for your Party
Written by: Kamau Austin |
Distributed: 2006-05-11 |
Word Count: 563 |
Page Views: 5304
| Votes: 11 |
Rating: 1.36
If you want to have a party that everyone will be talking about
for days and years later, hire a good DJ to run your music and
light show. Hiring a DJ can actually be fun. Just follow these
simple tips, and you are sure to have a fabulous DJ for your
party.
Highest Ranked "" Articles
Finding the Adventure in Travel Again
Written by: Helen Bergstein |
Distributed: 2006-05-11 |
Word Count: 718 |
Page Views: 4395
| Votes: 14 |
Rating: 2.64
If you want to experience adventure at every level of your next
trip, you need to go beyond the usual resorts and places to stay.
If you're like most travelers, personal safety remains a priority,
especially in today's world. A growing number of savvy travelers
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Freedom- or Burden of Choice?
Written by: Patsi Krakoff |
Distributed: 2004-09-30 |
Word Count: 0 |
Page Views: 1099
| Votes: 7 |
Rating: 2.57
Everyday decisions have become increasingly complex due to the
overwhelming abundance of choice with which we are presented.
A trip to a typical supermarket reveals enormous choices such
as 85 different crackers, 285 types of cookies, 230 varieties
of canned soup, 80 different pain relievers, and 360 kinds of
shampoo. Does this improve the quality of our lives?
Building your Credit to get a Mortgage
Written by: Kamau Austin |
Distributed: 2006-05-11 |
Word Count: 840 |
Page Views: 5360
| Votes: 17 |
Rating: 2.24
You are thinking about purchasing real estate. However, you are
not sure if your credit is good enough to get a mortgage. There
are things that you can do to build your credit so that it is
worthy of any mortgage that may interest you.
Flowers Are The Perfect Gift For Father's Day
Written by: Wesley Berry, AAF |
Distributed: 2008-02-20 |
Word Count: 486 |
Page Views: 5926
| Votes: 17 |
Rating: 2.24
Dads everywhere have Sonora Smart Dodd to thank for getting
Father's Day started. In 1909, Sonora sat in a church in Spokane,
Washington listening to a sermon expounding on the virtues of
motherhood. But, as she sat there, she thought about how special
her own father was since it was he who raised her after the death
of her mother.
Testimonials and Reviews Increase Your Real Sales Potential
Written by: Bill Platt |
Distributed: 2006-02-10 |
Word Count: 0 |
Page Views: 2930
| Votes: 9 |
Rating: 2.00
The one essential ingredient for online success in
any endeavor is gaining your prospect's trust.
7 Tips to Hiring a Good DJ for your Party
Written by: Kamau Austin |
Distributed: 2006-05-11 |
Word Count: 563 |
Page Views: 5304
| Votes: 11 |
Rating: 1.36
If you want to have a party that everyone will be talking about
for days and years later, hire a good DJ to run your music and
light show. Hiring a DJ can actually be fun. Just follow these
simple tips, and you are sure to have a fabulous DJ for your
party.
Ann Arbor, MI Offers A Lot Of Year-Around Family Fun
Written by: Jeb Maxwell |
Distributed: 2010-01-20 |
Word Count: 595 |
Page Views: 4757
| Votes: 8 |
Rating: 1.25
Ann Arbor, Michigan is the home of the University of Michigan, a
leading institution of higher education. Ann Arbor is a wonderful
place to visit. The University is co-mingled with the city and
greatly expands the cultural places and events available in the
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Distributed: 2005-09-14 |
Word Count: 0 |
Page Views: 2159
| Votes: 5 |
Rating: 1.20
If you are on a budget (and who isn’t?), a wonderful place for
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The "Proprietary Blend" Nutritional Supplement
Written by: Will Brink |
Distributed: 2006-02-10 |
Word Count: 0 |
Page Views: 3511
| Votes: 5 |
Rating: 0.60
In a nut shell, I went onto cover each of these common marketing
terms that are used to sell supplements to unwitting consumers
and explained each in detail as to what I view as their common
misuse within the market place.
Brink's Unified Theory of Nutrition
Written by: Will Brink |
Distributed: 2006-02-24 |
Word Count: 0 |
Page Views: 2323
| Votes: 5 |
Rating: 0.60
Regardless of the topic, a unified theory, seeks to explain
seemingly incompatible aspects of various theories. In this
article I attempt to unify seemingly incompatible or opposing
views regarding nutrition, namely, what is probably the longest
running debate in the nutritional sciences: calories vs. macro
nutrients.
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