The New Forefronts of Online Customer Support

Article Written By: jeniffermaben

As an online entrepreneur or the head of a service organization, you 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. Hire a competent Wordpress development firm to set up your corporate blog for you. You can use any one of the thousands of free templates currently available for your blog design or you can pay for a premium Wordpress theme for under $100 average. Once set up correctly, you do not need the services of a software design and consulting firm to upload your blog posts.

It is so simple that middle school kids all over the US are uploading their own blog content themselves. 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—all of which you can easily implement once your Wordpress corporate blog has stabilized.

You should post at least two or three times a week to your corporate blog. Since the language style used in the blogosphere is traditional and informal, you really do not need to hire a copywriter to craft your blog posts for your company. This responsibility can be assigned in-house to any one of your employees who has a crisp and clean writing style. 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. If you decide to focus only on your company and its services in every blog post, many site visitors are liable not to return to you and go elsewhere. 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. Integrating an industry-focused newsletter once your corporate blog has a loyal audience is an idea worth exploring. 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.

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.

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 is convenient for your customers but expensive and time taking process for you.

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 way of support. You already have email, and you can answer to inquiries on your time.

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.

About the Author

Jennifer Maben - Live2Support Customer Chat Software and Sticky Notes

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