MBA1071 Do you need to offer phone support for your online business?

Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. Refreshingly practical and honest business lessons every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn do you need to offer phone support in an online business? Well, in today's episode I'm going to take it a step further and show you how email or chat support can serve your customers better than phone support. There's a reason why phone support is becoming less and less prevalent in the marketplace. It's simply not as efficient as phone support, which I will explain to you very, very shortly. Now this is not to say that phone support is totally useless. There are certain types of business where phone support is an advantage and a good option for you to offer your customers. And I'll share with you those scenarios in today's lesson as well. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Today's episode of the $100 MBA show is supported by Podia. Podia helps thousands of creators earn money from their passion. It's an all in one digital storefront that you can sell courses, memberships and digital downloads in one place. It's the most creator friendly platform on the market with zero transaction fees and a super friendly 24.7life support team no matter what plane you're on. So they're gonna take care of you even if you're just getting started. What's great about Podia is that it eliminates all the technical headaches. It takes care of every aspect of selling your course or membership or digital download. If you've got video courses, they do the video hosting for you. If you want an easy way to charge your members on a reoccurring basis for a membership, Podia takes care of it. You want a secure way for people to download your products. When they pay for them, they take care of that too. They also offer free migrations on their shaker plan. Best of all, Podia puts their money where their mouth is. They have a 30 day free trial with no credit card required. So if you don't love it, you don't pay a penny. If you're looking to start a online course, sell any kind of digital product or start a membership site, check them out and support the show by going to podia.com that's P O D I a.com MBA remember playing telephone when you were a Kid, you know that game where you would tell someone something in their ear and then they would tell the person next to them, and so on and so forth. And at the end the phrase that you originally said is completely distorted. Instead of the phrase being I'm going to Alaska, it becomes apes love asking, you know what I'm talking about. Now this can happen even with one on one conversations. There is a higher chance of miscommunication, misunderstanding when it's audio. This is especially true if some of our clients are not native English speakers. If they didn't grow up learning English, their ear is not going to be completely tuned to every single word you say. Did they say 17 or 70? There's a reason why people say put it in writing because it's in black and white and there's no miscommunication. This is the huge advantage of email and chat. When you write out messages, one, it forces you to communicate clearly and concisely because you're reading back your message before you hit send. And number two, there's a whole lot less room for misinterpretation when it comes to texts. This is going to help make your support a lot more efficient. You're not going to spend so much time going back and forth. Also, with phone support, you only can handle one customer at a time and that's not really ideal, especially for high ticket volume or high support volume. With chat or messages, you can send a message and wait for a response and then work on the next one. Sometimes people have to do things in the support process. So you tell your customer, hey, I want you to do this step. Go ahead and do this step. Let's say it's live chat support. They go ahead and do this step. While they're doing that step, you can help another customer. This allows you to have a more robust support system and support team without having 10, 20, hundreds of agents. Also with phone support, one person has to deal with that customer. Let me give you a scenario. I call in for phone support and I need something solved. There's a likelihood that I will not be able to solve it on the call. So that means somebody has to follow up with me. What does that entail? Well, I just spent maybe 20 minutes having a conversation about the problem and trying to solve it with the agent. It's the agent wasn't able to solve it and most likely that agent's going to have to call me back. They're going to have to write up some notes and then call back the actual customer. If they want to hand over that ticket or that support issue to somebody else, there's going to be some handover time, meaning that another person will have to call you. If it's not that person, they'll have to reacquaint themselves with a problem, discuss it with you, and hopefully try to solve it. Then, with email support, it's so much easier for someone to pick up a ticket because they see the whole thread of conversation right in front of them. They can read through the threaded conversation and pick up wherever the other agent left off. That means the customer doesn't have to wait 24 hours for when that person has their shift the next time to answer that question or to call back that customer, they can get an answer to the next person available. Also, with email and chat support, so much easier to reference some materials to help them out, tutorials, guides, videos that you have created for your customers. You. You can easily link them up in an email or a chat message and they can just click that link and learn how to do something. If you're on phone, reading out a link is not easy, especially if it's a complicated link. Yes, you can also send them an email, but what's the point? If you're on the phone and you're sending emails, you might as well just stick to email. That also leads me to the fact that written support is well documented, meaning that I can use it as a reference. If I have a problem or I forget how to solve that problem or how to do something, I can always go back to my inbox and find that email from support. Can't do that. With phone support, there is no reference to that call. I can't go back. But here's one of the biggest reasons why email or chat support, or what I call text based support, is better than phone support when you have to write things down. When you're writing, you have to make sure it's clear you're going to edit your writing. You're going to make sure you're communicating properly and that you're concise and you're giving all the information needed. Writing forces you to do this. It's easy to get lazy with information when you're just talking, when you're on a phone call. In fact, the people over at Basecamp, they're big on this. They want to make sure everybody's a great writer because all their support is text based, because they know this is the most efficient way to deliver support for the customer and the business. So they actually evaluate people's writing to see can you communicate clearly in writing. This is why when we hire new customer support agents, we give them written tasks to answer typical support questions that we get. And they complete these tasks, of course, in written form and allows us to see how they would answer these questions and how good is their written skills. I mean, look at your favorite book, look at a great blog post. That's always going to be communicating more clearly than somebody who's giving a speech or talking to you on the phone. But is Phone Support all bad? Is there ever a scenario where phone support is a good idea in your business? Well, we get into that in a moment, but before that, let me give love to today's sponsor. Support for today's show comes from Microsoft Surface. I'm a big believer in making sure you're as productive as possible when working on your business. One productivity hack that really has worked for me is creating an environment of focus. Sometimes when you work in the same place day in and day out like your home office, you slip into bad habits that derail you from your to do list. A good way to shake it up is to change your location. If you feel like you're getting distracted, get up and go to a cafe. Go to a co working space. Change your environment so you can get refocused. That's why I'm so pumped to share with you the all new Surface Go, the smallest Microsoft Surface ever. At just over a pound and with a 10 inch touchscreen, the the Surface Go gives you laptop performance and tablet portability. From running office to taking care of your everyday tasks, the Surface Go easily adapts to all your needs no matter where you are. And with prices Starting at just $399, it also adjusts to your budget. So what are you waiting for? It's time to go. Well, is phone support all bad? Of course not. But for most businesses where you have to show people how to do things, tutorials for software or questions about a course or a physical product, email and chat are great. But for consulting, where you're talking about strategy and you want to walk somebody through or brainstorm ideas or coaching, where a conversation on the phone would lend itself to a more impactful session, then phone support is definitely a good option. And most business models that are like a consulting business, a coaching business phone phone support in a package is charged, meaning that you have to pay extra to get that phone access because it's not easy to scale. When there's no details or critical information, then phone support is actually a good option. Phone support is also a great option. If your Product or service requires some sort of onboarding or installation or assembly or something that's quite complicated that they can't do on their own or where instructions or tutorials are just not going to cut it, you need somebody to coach them through it. Often these are high ticket items, high priced items, high priced products. And offering a phone support option might be a good option. For example, Salesforce. Salesforce is a huge software company and their software is quite complicated. And to install Salesforce in your business to kind of replace other pieces of software is going to require a lot of work and a lot of hand holding. It's not sold as a simple and easy to use product. So phone support is part of one of their packages, so it makes total sense for them. But if your product is easy to use, if basically, if they know how to use Facebook, they could use your product, whether it's a course or if it's a software or an app and it's pretty intuitive, then written tutorials are going to be plenty. And chat support will help them with that. You can direct them to those tutorials in chat or email support. In fact, a lot of experts say that you have to actually train your customers to be reliant on themselves, meaning that they have to learn how to do things. You can't just keep doing things for them. In order for your product to be sustainable or for them to be a continuous buyer or somebody who keeps renewing their contract with you or their service, they need to be able to do it themselves. So your product's gotta be somewhat easy to do and they gotta find easy ways to learn how to do things, whether they're written tutorials or video tutorials. So there you have it. Personally, I think for most businesses, email and chat support is probably the way to go. But for those who have businesses, like I mentioned, phone support is a great option. So depending on your business, you'll know if you need to have phone support or not. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, leave us an itunes rating and review. We'd love to hear from you and hear what you love about the show. Everybody who leaves us an itunes rating and review enters our weekly random draw we call free ride Friday. Every Friday, we give away free access to one of our pro programs. All you got to do is leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter the draw and listen on Friday to see if you won. All right, before I go, I want to leave you with this. Whether you're selling a product or a service. You're in the service business. You're in the serving your customer business. So support is a critical part of the experience of buying from you. So whether you go with phone or chat or email, you got to make sure your service is top notch. You gotta make sure you hire some great talent and you train them to be even better. This is a huge investment we've made in our business, Webinar Ninja, our software business. And we continue to invest, we continue to hire new agents. We just made a whole bunch of hires this week as we're growing to make sure our customers don't wait that long for responses. They get efficient responses. They get friendly people they want to speak to and that they win with our product, that they actually use our product, are successful with it. That's when you win, when they are successful with your product, and support makes that happen. All right, I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care, Sam.