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
event that 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 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 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 point of needing something better, then please keep reading.
Small business people often find themselves in 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 cheapest solution, it is not always 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 very real possibility of sales inquiries not being handled until Bob can return to work. So way to handle this becomes making sure that everyone has access to accounts that handle sales inquiries and support inquiries. So, you make arrangements for both Bob and Steve to be able to get email from 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 email. If both Bob and Steve answer inquiry, then your company now looks as if it consists of a couple of bumbling idiots. That is definitely not 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.
