Customer Support for Small Business – Protect Your Time With Information, Not Walls

As a start up or a small but growing business, the most precious resource you have is time. It is something you never have enough of and something that can never be replenished. Every business owner knows this and they do all they can to protect their time.

Unfortunately, many small businesses think that the best way to protect their time is by building barriers that prevent their customers from contacting them when they have problems. While this may protect their time it creates frustrated customers who either won’t purchase or won’t recommend the company’s products.

If you protect your time at the expense of customer satisfaction your business will suffer.

Your customers who need support don’t want your time. They just want answers to their problems. They don’t care how they get it as long as the answer is correct and easy to understand.

You have two choices:

1. Build walls around yourself to keep the customer from getting to you, or
2. Surround yourself with information that gives customers the answers they need before they ever need to contact you.

BAD – Build a Wall of Obstacles to Keep People Out

Building a wall around yourself generally takes two forms:

1. Hiding contact information.
2. Not responding to support calls/emails/forum posts.

This will definitely save you time in the short term but with the high cost of dissatisfied customers. Customers will quickly figure out that you are only interested in their purchase of your product and not their success with your product.

GOOD – Build a Wall of Information to Help People Out

Option 2 is to surround yourself with information. Remember, as soon as your customer finds the answer they need they will go away satisfied. Surround yourself with helpful information and many of your customers will never need to contact you directly. This will free up time for you to work with those who do need direct interaction.

Here are four tips for surrounding yourself with helpful information:

1. Don’t lock your documentation up in a PDF manual. Make sure that you offer online help that is useful.
2. Don’t lock your training material up in videos that are too long or aren’t searchable. Your customer needs to be able to find the information.
3. Don’t use text when a picture would be better. Visual help files are the most effective way of answering how-to questions. Use them. Programs like ScreenSteps make creating visual help files very fast and very easy.
4. Find where your information is lacking and improve it. If you are missing an answer to a question, create a new help file that can be reused in the future. This will save you time down the road.

Helping your customers doesn’t have to be time intensive. Instead of building up barriers for your customers, surround yourself with answers to their questions. Doing this will protect your time, help your customers be successful and make your business better.