Do You Need A Helpdesk Facility?

Do you provide support to your customers using emails? Are they intermingled with other general emails that you receive? Have you ever missed an important email from a customer requesting assistance?

Have you subsequently lost business or had to deal with an irate customer. If you provide a great online service very few people will mention it. One angry or irate customer can undo all your hard work by posting comments on various websites/forums/blogs that will have a significant negative impact on your reputation.

The key to building a great relationship with your customers to ensure they keep coming back involves providing them with excellent customer service. When you run an offline business this is easy as you are working with the customer face-to-face. When you run an online business your customers will most likely never meet you and in many cases their only dealings are via email. This unfortunately can result in the scenario mentioned above occurring.

What you need is a Helpdesk facility (sometimes called a Ticket Support system) on your website. A Helpdesk facility operates by logging all support requests in order of receipt and as the customer can indicate the severity of the problem you can identify which customers need support immediately and those that can be dealt with later.

You may want to separate areas of your business within the Support system, for example, an area to deal with Finance/Billing/Invoicing, one for Product enquiries, one for Product support, etc. If you have a number of employees then each can have their own separate access and dedicated area of expertise. You will be able to keep an overall check on the tickets received and those which need dealt with.

If you have cPanel hosting then most will have a Support Ticket script that can be installed quickly using 1-click install. If you are not using cPanel hosting then it is possible to use a third party provider and place a link on your site. This will be hosted on a third party server. You can do a search on any search engine for either Helpdesk or Support Ticket hosted facilities.

If you want to ensure that your customers are getting appropriate support thereby ensuring that they remain loyal to you, then you need to install and use a Helpdesk facility. It will provide your customers with the professional level of support they deserve.

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