You need to make sure your customers receivethe same quick and efficient support. Howyou handle customer support can and will makeor break a company. Too many companies now, concentrate on the front-end sale, but veryrarely work at keeping that customer afterthe sale has been established. If you havea website that focuses on "free" productsor services, these customers should betreated the same as if they were "paying"customers.

If you treat all customers, whether paidor free, the same and with respect, youwill find these customers will be therefor years to come. It is these customers, that will help you establish your companyand they will refer others to you andcontinue to purchase or use your services.

Without customers, where would your businessbe? Each and every customer support issue, you need to address promptly, honestly andin a professional manner.

How can you handle customer support issues?

There are quite a few tools, software orprograms that will assist you with dealingwith customer support. The most favorite nowis the Help desk system. Many companies areintegrating these support systems into theirwebsites.

Help Desk Ticket System

This is one of the more popular customerservice systems being used now. With a helpdesk system, your customer can log a supportticket, they can track the ticket and receivethe response they need. With most ticketsystems, they also include a knowledge database, this is a place where you can put the mostfrequent asked questions. By providing this, your customers may browse the database andmay very well find the answer to theirquestion, before having to log a supportticket.

All tickets put in by a customer are loggedand saved in the database. This is verybeneficial, because you and the customer cantrack what was previously said, what theissues were and just by saving it, it is aplace where your customers can reference later.

A help desk system will also help you analyzeyour customer support promptness but also itallows the customer to rate the service theyreceived. This is very valuable informationand will show you if your customers are happywith the support responses and the time ittook to receive the answers to their questions.

We use http://www.perldesk.com for our ticketsystem, it is affordable and is loaded withfeatures. Liz Smith, handles our customersupport and by logging into the ticket system, I can see the average response time as ofMay 2005 is 2 hr(s) 10 min(s) 35 seconds plusshe has responded and closed over 5500 ticketssince we installed the ticket system just overa year ago. Our customers have rated Liz'sprompt and helpful responses 5 stars!

This is valuable information for a company andit shows that our customers are being helpedand very QUICKLY!

A happy customer is a lasting customer.

There are quite a few ticket systems out there, you can do a search on a search engine and finda few, ask around and find out what yourassociates are using. The key is to find oneand put it to use.

FORUMS - Customer Support

Another tool that is used for customer supportare forums. Forums have a way to bring yourcustomers together in one place where they canreport or comment on issues, programs etc. Allanswers and questions are open to the public tosee and this may help another customer withtheir issue. By displaying comments, suggestions, etc in a forum, your customers have a tool theycan search through and most likely find theanswer to their issue. By having a forum andletting your members access to it, this couldslow down the actual customer support yourcompany deals with on a day to day basis.

There is a wide variety of forums that areavailable with unique and standard features. Search around, if you know of a company thatuses a forum for customer support, find outwhere to purchase it from, how the companylikes it, pros & cons. We have seen quite afew companies with a forum that is providedby Gossamer-Threadshttp://www.gossamer-threads.com/scripts/gforum/index.htm - it is loaded with features and pretty easy to setup.

Other companies that provide forum software:

http://forum. snitz.com http://www.usebb.net http://www.wowbb.com

LIVE CHAT SUPPORT

Live chat support is another affordable andefficient tool for providing customer supportand is integrated into your website pagesthrough either java or pre-written HTML codeprovided to you. Usually how this works is abox or image is then displayed on your websitethat says Live Support, or something to thataffect, when clicked, it will take your customerto your live chat support. Your potentialcustomer can ask you questions right then andthere. This may be very helpful in securing apotential sale, or from losing a customer.

Here are a few different companies that providechat support software:

http://www.liveperson.com http://www.livechatnow.com http://www.websitealive.com http://www.realchat.com http://www.sightmax.com

There are a lot of choices for software andtools that will help you deal with customersupport issues. The only bad choice that canbe made is NOT to choose one and use it.

Ignore your customers, provide dishonestanswers and take multiple days to answer; You may as well fold up shop now. Your customers will not be there tomorrow.