Evan Carmichael answers Sophia's question about help-desk software for her new business. For early-stage startups, handle support yourself instead of using a ticketing system: you get fast feedback, can fix problems quickly, and turn frustrated customers into loyal ones. As you grow, hire a dedicated person or freelancer through oDesk to keep costs down.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my forum readers, Sophia, who wrote in about help desk software for her new business and wanted my advice. So she wrote in saying, I'm running a small business online now and I really do not want to do too much one-on-one customer service. Can I use a customer service support software? What is the best customer support software online? How can I use it? Please help. I saw one last night called iCode HelpDesk X. I want to buy it, not sure whether it works. Please give me some useful advice. Thank you so much. So Sophia, thanks for the question. I haven't heard of that, that software before, but I'll try to give you a couple of tips that might help you solve this challenge. First off, if you're running any kind of online business, you want to make the experience as simple as possible so that you don't have a lot of customer complaints or questions. If, you know, for the people who do have problems and write in, there's 10 times the amount who never write in and just abandon your site. So if it's really complicated, then they're going to leave. And my first software company was a biotech software company. We didn't have the most features, but ours was the easiest software to use on the market, and that got us a lot of attention, a lot of customers, and we didn't have to to do a lot of support, which also helped us be able to build up our business and get more customers as well. So whatever it is that you're doing online, you want to try to make it as easy as possible for your customers to take the next step so they don't have to write in and ask questions on what to do next. So that being said, assuming you're already doing that, you're still going to have some people who have problems. So what do you do as a next step? My suggestion would not be to use a software company. Reason being, when you're in startup mode, you want to get as close to your customers as possible. So people are having problems You want to be able to answer those questions really quickly, respond quickly, be able to make fixes, you know, as quick as you can. The one thing that differentiates a small startup from a big company is flexibility and speed. So you want to take advantage of that. You don't want to wait a long time to get back to people. If you're finding people asking similar questions or having problems with something, you want to make a change right away and try to keep that customer as long as you can, make them happy. And if you can overturn a bad situation to a positive, you're more likely to keep that customer for long term, and also they're going to tell their friends about the great experience they had. Nobody goes and tells their friends about the great experience they had using a customer service software online, right? It's from the personal touch they get from dealing with people at the company. So especially when you're in startup mode, I would not use a software company. I would try to do it personally. Get the feedback from the customers, build close relationships, and be able to take the feedback they give you to make your product better. As you grow, I then would look at delegating that, so having somebody on the team. And on my team, I don't— so we have 6,000 people who write for my website. I am not managing those relationships. I used to, and then it just took up way too much of my time, so I brought on somebody, and that's her main function is to work with our authors and answer their questions and build new innovations to help them out. And so you want to have somebody who is responsive in an ideal world. I'm trying to give you options. You can look at even a place like oDesk.com to try to find people to help on the support side that hopefully are maybe a cheaper rate than you would get locally if budget is a really big issue for you. If you absolutely have to, have to, have to get a software, I'd look at Zendesk. I've heard some good things about it, I haven't used it personally, but there is a free trial so that will let you test things out to see if you like it or not. That would be my suggestion for the start. For most of these online software tools, there usually is a free trial, so you should be able to check it out, test it, see if it works, and see if it solves your needs, and then make a decision about buying or not. I'd be wary about something that just asks you to make a commitment upfront. So I would definitely check out Zendesk. I have no affiliation with them other than I've heard a few good things about them. But again, if you could, I try to do everything yourself personally at the beginning to get the feedback, to make it so easy to use that you don't have a lot of customer feedback. And then as you grow, having somebody else on your team be responsive, provide awesome service, because that's how you're going to be able to stand out compared to the more established competitors. So hopefully that helps, Sophia. Maybe not quite the answer you wanted to hear, but that's what I think. So hopefully that gives you something to think about. For those watching the video, if you liked it, please give it a thumbs up below. It makes me want to do more videos like this for you guys. And if you have a comment about this video or a question of your own about your business, feel free to leave it in the comment section below. And I read everyone and do my best to answer everybody. So thank you, and we'll see you on the next episode.
