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“Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and you have fed him for a lifetime.”

Small businesses are often tasked with the mounting pressure of providing quality customer support. With just your own efforts or a handful of employees to help, it can seem like your business duties have got you stretched as thin as angel hair pasta, but it’s actually simple to set up a virtual customer support center. Establish an online forum for your business and provide your customers with self-help tools. You’ll be able to stick to your highest income-producing activities and give them what they need.

How to Compensate for a Small Workforce

Reading and responding to emails can easily dominate your entire schedule. While emails help us communicate certain messages with improved efficiency, they can also drag our efficiency levels through the mud if we don’t create a seamless response-management system. Likewise, fielding questions and concerns from your prospects and customers on the phone can take even longer, since phone conversations tend to lack the conciseness that emails promote.

What’s the worst part? Most business owners tend to repeatedly answer the same questions ad nauseum. You can break this cycle by recording all the questions and concerns that pop up about your business. Don’t just record the most frequent ones either—any additional information you provide can save you time down the road. Are you a small business who’s just starting out and lacking questions that have actually been asked about your business? Get into think-tank mode with some friends, associates, or family members and brainstorm on some possible concerns and issues that your prospects might eventually have.

Give Them What They Want In Forums

The first thing you’ll want to do is create a simple FAQ’s section directly on your site. Use the most frequently asked questions to generate your content here. After you’ve done that though, you must set up a more comprehensive resource if you truly plan to lighten your customer service load or completely eschew having a customer service department.

Create an online forum and provide a link to it directly on your website. Each of your threads should address a new topic or potential question that might be asked about your business. Hopefully, the information you provide there will be enough to answer their questions. And even if it’s not they will have the opportunity to ask you clarifying questions. You can then provide the answer and then record that clarifying question and fortify your previous answer for future use. You’ll also prove to prospects that you run an attentive business and will take care of their needs, helping them justify spending money with you. Another plus about these forums is that visitors have the opportunity to help each other, answering each other’s questions for you.

Be Proactive with Newsletters

Use newsletters to essentially head people’s questions off at the pass. People love when information is actually sent right to them without them having to look it up themselves. A confused mind never buys: Be proactive and make your information readily available and you will increase your conversion rates.

Use your newsletter as a conveyance for your FAQ’s. Send a new answer to a frequently asked question each week to clear doubts from your prospects’ minds.

A regularly scheduled newsletter also creates an ideal opportunity to blend in a special promotion for your product or service. Send an offer by itself and it’s an advertisement. Send an offer paired with useful information intended to make things easier for your clients and it becomes an invitation to better times.

To your success,

Andrew Rossillo

Andrew Rossillo is Content Crooner’s Marketing Blogger and Staff Writer. He’s ready to put his years of copywriting and online marketing experience to work for your business—he’ll help you get noticed!

Tags: customer service tips, how to create FAQ's, online forum tips

This entry was posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010 at 5:28 am and is filed under Management, Online Forums. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.