Website Customer Support Features
Supporting Customers Impacts Small Business Productivity
Small businesses often do not have a big budget for hiring customer
support staff. The impact of this is that other staff members who
are trying to get their work done are constantly interupted by
customer support requests. Building customer support features
into your website can greatly reduce the number of interuptions
you and your staff get regarding simple customer support calls.
24 Hour Customer Support
Chances are that your customers will appreciate the fact that they
can get information about your company, products, services, and
even the status of their orders and projects online 24 hours a day.
It is a very good idea to create a section of your website develoted
to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and to keep it up to date as
much as you can. Be sure to mention your customer support features
in email and phone conversations with your customers. This establishes your website as
your "first line of defense" for customer support and queries for basic
company information.
Website Features for Advanced Online Customer Support
Providing customers information like order status or other sensitive
and restricted information can be accomplished by creating
membership features on your site that allow users to register for
membership. The registration process should require email
verification and password protection. Members will only be
granted access to sensitive information after they have
successfully logged on to your site on a secure connection
over Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) which encrypts (encodes)
the data that is transmitted back and forth between the user's
browser and your web server.