Product Support Solutions to Reduce the Time You Spend Dealing With Customers

Product support can really eat into your time and your working day. If you're a developer, or are even selling a product such as an ebook, it's inevitable that you will receive support questions. These might range from simple ones, such as how to download, open or use the product, to more complex issues which required investigation. You need to be thinking of strategies to help you to reduce product support and the time spend on it. I'm going to explore some of these in this article.

First of all, try and get rid of any common questions before they even reach you by making changes to the product. If you've developed software, and there's a certain part of the interface that always causes problems, the redesign that part of the interface to avoid it. Alternatively, create some context sensitive help to assist your users. Even with an ebook, you might notice common issues. Perhaps you're in a niche where readers aren't used to PDFs. Pre-empt that by providing a link for them to download the reader that is needed.

Next, make sure to have canned answers prepared. These are answers which you will want to reuse, with perhaps minor changes such as the product name or customer name. That way, you can just copy and paste these into a reply, make very small changes and send these out. A good example of this is where customers have lost their download link, or it has expired. The email you need to send to these customers is always very similar, so it's important to not have to write a new one from scratch each and every time.

The last thing you should do is to seriously consider outsourcing this support process. You could employ someone for an hour or two a day to deal with every common query and only pass the most difficult ones on to you. That will free up an hour or two of your time, if that is how long it takes you to deal with support issues. Now, it may take trialling a few different people to find who can best support your product, but once this is done you will have a business asset. Even consider offering this role to some of your best customers, as they will probably have the best understanding of how your product works.

Make sure that you are taking customer support seriously. This can be a big time drain for marketers if not. The ideas I've suggested in this article should give you some starting points. Make sure to address common issues both in your product itself and in the form of canned responses. Hire someone to help with support once your business is big enough. Then concentrate on your making your next product from your million dollar idea.

If you need more help and advice about growing and supporting your online business, check out some of Thom Lancaster's insightful blog posts on this topic. Recommendations include Paying For Marketing and Community Styled Blogging, where Thom is keen for you to add your own comments, thoughts and questions as you read.