Support Options for Your Clients
Good support and response time is something which clients look for in their host. If you are good at this, then you can expect good feedback and referrals from them. On the contrary, if you are bad at this, then you can expect a bad reputation for support and short term clients which don't stay with your company for a long time.
You should have at least 3 methods in which hostees or potential clients can contact you, including:
email with address such as help@yoursite.com or support@yoursite.com
forums that are a good way to enable support as other clients that will more than likely help each other out
telephone with a toll free number that will make you look very professional and serious. If you can't afford it, most clients understand since it costs a lot of money. You could list your home or office telephone number.
Human Click/Live Person, either a free version or a paid one, which is basically an instant messenger that activated by the potential client on your site via an image link. Check out: http://liveperson.com/.
address is good to be included, such as your home/company address on your support page(s) as some people feel skeptical about hosting companies not offering their address.
instant messenger such as yahoo, aol, icq or msn as support options can provide a good support method.
ticket support desk where clients signup, login, write up their question/problem and take a ticket and wait for someone to respond. The disadvantage of this is that it is not real time, which makes it inappropriate for simple questions. But, for complicated technical issues or the like it is extremely valuable. For your information, Perl desk is a free support desk software (paid option is also available) and easy to configure/setup/use. Check out: http://perldesk.com/.
|
By Location