Providing customer support for any product is essential to not only keeping your customers but also when it comes to attracting your customers.

But answering support tickets can be a “drag” and it’s definitely not the most glamorous part of running a business. Here are some tips that will dramatically help you cut down the amount of time it takes to provide World Class Support…

First things first.

You Need a Support Desk

Having a ticket based support desk is crucial because it prevents a lot of problems before they happen. It allows you to track all customer communication and it gives you a central location to maintain all your support related issues.

There are many support solutions out there but we’ve had a very good experience with a basic (and FREE) help desk called eTicket Support.

It installs on your server and allows for email piping (which means a ticket will automatically be created if someone sends an email to a certain address like support@yourdomain.com).

Plus it has the basics of being able to create multiple users and it has a simple user interface which makes it easy to manage your support requests.

If you are technical, you’ll have no trouble installing it.  If you’re not technical, then I’d definitely recommend hiring a programmer to install it for you (which wouldn’t cost any more than $50-70 on RentaCoder.com or Scriptlance.com).

You don’t have to go with eTicket but you DO need a support desk.  So no matter what solution you decide to use, make sure that it’s easy for your customers to submit tickets and receive back and forth communication.

Now that you have a support desk, the challenge is how to prevent tickets in the first place

5 Ways To Dramatically Cut Down Your Support Tickets

One thing that has dramatically helped us in regards to customer support is to go WAY beyond what you think you need to do in order to prevent tickets from even being created.

Although our products are more technical, here are some of the things we’ve done…

1) Create Tutorial Videos – For our product WishList Member, these videos walk people through all the features of our software product and show people how to use them. For us, we actually give the majority of these videos out for free before someone even buys because it saves a lot of questions from people “thinking” about buying.

You can see what we’ve done here:
http://member.wishlistproducts.com

People LOVE to be able to “see” how to do something so providing tutorial videos is a very effective way to cut down your ongoing support.

Remember, the more you invest in creating support materials now, the less support you’ll have to provide later.

2) Create Installation Videos – Don’t assume that just because your customers purchased your product that they are going to know how to use.

Since our product (WishList Member) is driven by WordPress, we initially made the mistake of thinking that if someone purchases WishList Member, that they would know how to use WordPress.

That wasn’t the case and we began to get a lot of questions around just the basics of using WordPress. So because of that, we created very basic Installation Videos for WordPress and that immediately eliminated a TON of support tickets.

So even if you don’t have a “software” product, I still recommend creating some videos that teach people how to consume your product. Here’s the first question you need to answer…

“Now that I’ve bought, what do I do next?”

For example, if you have a membership site, create a video that provides a guided tour of your membership. If you have an ebook, give a video of you going through the Table of Contents etc.

In addition, the “walkthrough” video is also a GREAT place to outline the expected method of communication. This is where you given your customers instructions about…

“If you need support, read our support guides, check our FAQ’s, watch the videos etc. If you can’t find an answer then please feel free to contact our help desk which is open M-F 8am-5pm.”

“If you have billing inquiries, go here”

“If you would like to join our affiliate program, go here”.

“If you would like to contact _____ personally, then please schedule an appointment by going to…”

You get the idea.

The thing to remember is that more proactive you can be to prevent questions, the less you will get.

3) FAQ Section – We have one for both “pre-sales” questions and for “customer” questions. You would not believe how many customers refer to these on a daily basis. Everytime you answer a question in your Support Desk, see if you can add it to your FAQ section on your website.

The key if you have a lot of questions is to make them “searchable”. That way people can find what they need relatively quickly.

We also like to organize our questions into sections to make it even easier once again. Just remember, every little thing you do to make it easy and obvious for your customers on the front end, the less support you will have on the back end.

4) Support Documents – I’m really proud of our team because they created some of the best support docs I’ve ever seen.

The key is to include LOTS of screen shots in order to make the instructions VERY obvious as far as what to do. Even then, I still recommend adding big red arrows showing people what to click, what to type etc.

It’s advisable to include a Table of Contents so that people can jump to the sections they need within your document without having to read the whole thing.

The big lesson we learned is that not everyone wants to view your videos. So having some written docs to supplement your video tutorials is a must and will save you a lot of help desk tickets.

The other big lesson we just learned is that it’s important to continually reference your support docs. So each time your support staff give an answer, add a P.S statement at the end of their ticket that says “If you have other questions like this, you might want to reference our support docs which you can find here: www.LINK.com.”

In fact, if you create a “welcome” video for your product I would reference the support docs in that video and show how easy it is to find the answers they need by referencing the Table of Contents.

BIG TIP: Show them and train them on how to use your other support options BEFORE contacting your support desk

5) Provide a Quick Start Guide (Most Important) – Train people on what to do once they buy. Give them the step-by-step.

Even if you have an information product, it’s still important to tell people what to do immediately after buying. The moment your customers have to “think” about what to do, it will create questions for your help desk.

Quick Start Guides eliminate a lot of refunds and support questions because it helps the customer to start actually using your product. The more they use your product or consume your information, the less likely they are to ask for a refund.

Other Powerful Tips

Provide Lots of Screen Shots – People need instructions to actually “show” them where to click. We use Jing to help us do this because it’s very quick and easy to take a screen shot, mark it up with arrows and then publish it online (plus it’s free).

Use ReplyPower – We managed to get an advanced copy of this little tool and it’s become one of the most powerful tools you can have when it comes to customer support.

Basically it lets you build a vault of answers to common questions that your support staff may use in your help desk, email or any other document.

So when a similar question comes up, you press a couple “hot keys” on your keyboard and then select the appropriate response from your list. It will then paste the entire pre-written response in the location where you wanted it.

Here’s a screenshot:

This tool has saved our staff thousands of hours when replying to tickets.

The other thing I REALLY like is that you can share your responses with others. So each time one of our support team create a new answer/reply, it gets shared with everyone else so that we all have a quick response all ready written should anyone ask that same question in the future.

Always Keep Your Support Documentation and Videos Updated – We just learned this the hard way as one customer put up a HUGE stink in a public forum claiming that our product wasn’t working.

At the end of the day, it was just a section from one of our videos was a little outdated because a third party service changed their interface and it no longer looked the same in our video (sigh). Nothing was broken with our software, it was just a misunderstanding.

So although we had the up-to-date screen shots in our Support Docs that showed the changes in the third party interface, we didn’t in the video and it threw her into a fit. The lesson learned from that is ALWAYS update your videos because even a slightly outdated video could cause more headaches than not having one in the first place!

If you follow these tips I guarantee your support load will be reduced.

The secret is to be as proactive as possible BEFORE the customer has a question. The more you can do to eliminate questions upfront, the less you will have in your support desk.

Hopefully these tips have been helpful.

All the best.

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