“Customer service is critical to business success.” “Give your customers a positive experience and they will return to you with more business.” “Be nice to your customers and very soon you will have them eating out of your hand”. Customers drive businesses, businesses do not drive customers. The real key to accomplishing this objective is to continuously innovate and introduce new ways of keeping your customer base happy and fulfilled so that they not only keep returning to your website, but also tell others about you and generate the right type of positive buzz you will need to grow.
Platform to Use in your Corporate Blog
As an online entrepreneur or the head of a service organization, you too should have your own corporate blog if you do not have one already. If your corporate website allows it from a technical standpoint, use it to host your blog. Otherwise, you can also set up a brand new corporate blogging website and join the big leagues for a pittance.
Wordpress, a free and open source blogging solution, has emerged as the undisputed leader in this realm. You can use any one of the thousands of free templates currently available for your blog design. Use the computer consulting firm’s services to implement major design changes, site overhauls and other updates and enhancements such as video uploads, slide presentations and customer polls.
Updating your Content
You should post at least two or three times a week to your corporate blog. Make product announcements. Identify innovative uses of your products and elaborate upon them. If you are planning to introduce a new product line, a new manufacturer or even a new service, your corporate blog is the best place to advertise it. Devote an equal number of blog posts to educational topics that inform your audience and add to their information library. Building and preserving repeat traffic is critical to your success as a corporate blogger. For the convenience of your readership, ask your consulting firm to install and activate a Feedburner account for you so that each time you update your corporate blog with a new post, your registered users hear about it right away via an automated e-mail message. Remember that each time you respond to a blog-generated e-mail message or blog comment, you are providing customer support and literally narrowing and bridging the gap between your customer community and your company.
Blog Comments and the Customer Response Factor
Although Wordpress allows for the moderation of all blog comments meaning that each time a site visitor leaves a comment on your blog, it goes live only when you approve it; it is a sound business practice to approve legitimately voiced critical and negative comments about your company and its products. If the comment happens to be valid, process it immediately, provide valid feedback, and clearly outline the reasons why you took an unfavorable decision assuming you did. This practice tends to build unprecedented levels of trust and credibility for companies.
Start with a Knowledge base / FAQs
If you have a straight forward product, you should set up a knowledge base or Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section. Customer will get the reply of their queries immediately and it will also save you a lot of time. You need to think all possible questions that can be generate in user’s mind before purchase and after the sales of your product. Start with a few and you can always add more to it as time goes by.
Set up a Forum
Forum is an excellent way to communicate and help your online customers. Adding a forum in your customer support system will differentiate you from your competitors. A lot of people associate a forum to discussions and moderating. It is tough to maintain a forum as it is the second place where your customers turn to help. This is only true if you use a forum as a discussion area. Being a good moderator you should have different forum categories for eg., pre sale questions, member questions, one category for each product.
Phone support
Phone support is convenient for your customers but expensive and time taking process for you.
Email support
Email Support is less efficient for the customer than phone support. It is fast and simple to send their questions to you, but uncertainty of time for responses is a concern. For you, email is one of the economical and easiest ways of support. You already have email, and you can answer to inquiries on your time.
Live chat software
It is the most effective conduit of online customer support for the website customer. Their queries can be replied instantly on the website by a real customer support agent. You just need to find a quality and reasonable live chat software, and it is available. Also, live chat requires that you, or an employee, are available to handle incoming chat requests as much as possible.
The New Forefronts of Online Customer Support