Reducing Your Support Needs
By Paul Kleinmeulman
If you are selling any product, then no doubt you have had at least one support request. It’s a very important part of business, customer service, but it doesn’t directly grow your business. On the other hand, if you are handling your support poorly very soon word gets around and you are losing business left and right.
This article is NOT about how to hire somebody to do your support, which is something that I have done for the past 3 years, and I strongly recommend you do the same. It is about how to reduce your support needs right at the start, reducing the bottle necks so you don’t have as many support issues.
Here are 3 suggestions…
1) Make Your Sales Process Simple
When I launched My Mind Shift (http://www.MyMindShift.com ), via a new membership type sales system, I quickly discovered that over 50% of customers, were not able to login after they created their membership. This was because they had to click on an email link to be fully registered, a double optin method. For some reason, most of the customers, didn’t receive that email, and I was getting a lot support emails saying "I can’t login" and I had take approximately 5 minutes for each customer, to login to the admin, approve them manually, and write them an email with their username and password to try again.
When you have over 140 sales in one day, it quickly builds up to be a huge task.
Immediately, I hired a coder, to change that bottleneck and remove the need to click the link in the email, before they could login and as soon as this new system was applied it removed all these extra support issues I was getting.
The system still has some issues, such as with the OTO and the download page so I have decided to scrap that membership system entirely, as it is more trouble then it is worth.
In my experience, the simpler the system the better.
Sales Page => Payment Processor => Customer List => Download Page
Works like a charm… reducing support issues tremendously.
2) Use Video Where You Can
If you have any difficult part for a customer to do for example, downloading an mp3 file, then don’t just tell them how to do it, show them via onscreen video.
Don’t overestimate the technical experience of your customers, especially in some niche markets. Your product might be the first online product that this customer has ever bought, and downloading the product is 100% foreign to them (some don’t even know what downloading means).
Make their first experience easy, by showing them exactly how to download your files or how to install your script. The competent customers will just skip over this, but for first timers, it will save you a lot of support issues.
But don’t just leave it at video, some people prefer to read, so give them an instruction manual with detailed screenshots.
3) Have A Frequently Asked Questions Section On Your Sales Page & Download Page
Another major part of support, is the questions that people have. Answer them before they ask, via a frequently asked questions section, on your sales page and your download page. I have found that most people’s questions are similar, so by answering one question before it is asked, you could be reducing your support by 20%.
So there you have it, 3 ways to instantly reduce your support issues. Take the effort once, and you could be permanently reducing your support issues in the future.
All the best to your online success,
Sincerely,
Paul Kleinmeulman
Australia
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