Wednesday, June 29, 2005

No Customer Left Behind ...

This is the first half of an article by Jim Edwards, thenetreporter.com.

We'll conclude tomorrow


As more companies make the jump to cyberspace every week and billions of dollars flow across the Internet, nobody can deny that ecommerce plays a significant roll in business today.

However, as the aisles of your local online shopping site get more crowded, the tendency for customer service issues and contact to fall through the cracks increases dramatically.

The main problem for any site revolves around the fact that email as a means of communication has become unreliable over the last couple of years.

Spam (unsolicited commercial email) lies at the heart of the problem since it clogs the email boxes of both the company and the customer.

In an attempt to stem the tide of spam, email gets filtered, lost, or deleted on both sides, often leading to hard feelings as customers think their emails have been ignored when actually they've never been received.

As a result, many companies, large and small, have started using "help desk" software to manage their customer communication.

Gone are the days of just emailing for support and getting a simple reply back from a live human being on the other end.

Spam makes it impossible for a company of any size to operate with email-only support.

A help desk makes it possible not only to maintain a "chain" of communication, but also avoids messages disappearing into cyberspace.

Help desk solutions run the range from free to several thousands of dollars for a custom program.

Two very workable and reasonably priced solutions are Kayako.com and Perldesk.com.

(You can also do a search in Google for "free help desk software" if you don't want to spend any money.)

We'll conclude tomorrow.

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jbv's Competitive Edge 

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