How Do You Set-up Your Customer Support

In my case I simply outsource the bulk of it to amazon.

I'm selling physical products and have amazon warehouse and fulfil orders for me. As part of the overall process they also deal with the main communication and customer support (which is supplement by me if it is other than the straighforward).

Good luck with your ventures.

That is a great post, Support as most people have learned is difficult sometimes hard to manage and can sap the life out of your entire day.

This might not be a lot of help now, but really the best method of reducing the average customer support emails is to develop support materials that turn you into the Maytag Repair man, you know the commercial where the guy is bored out of his mind because he has nothing to do.

That might be a little over the top because no matter how good your product is and no matter how many videos and PDF files you have there are always going to be some that either do not take the time to review the support materials or just don't care...

I provide support for several large products and over time I have found that generating better support materials like videos and even software that helps customers get the job done faster goes a long way to reducing the over all support burden.

I basically said that in a generic way, meaning that anyone reading this might find it somewhat useful.

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I think the two greatest challenges in outsourcing support is Trust and Professionalism.

Customers are sometimes mad and frustrated because they can't get something done and if your support staff are not well trained and professional that will reflect badly on you or your product or worse both.

Training experience and support materials are probably the biggest things that are many times lacking.

(additionally, if the support staff does not use english well its a problem that often creates more problems than it solves)

Sort of gives me an idea for a new product, LOL, thanks for that.

I've been wondering the same lately. I want to turn over my client check-in process to a VA, and that would require access to my merchant account (no problem there), Google calendar and CRM, so it's not only my passwords but also puts all the clients' credit card info right into the VA's hands.

I've never actually set it up myself, though I see a lot of people using Zendesk and then creating an account for their support staff.

I'm not certain, though I am pretty sure you can set it up so that if someone emails a specific email address, your Zendesk system picks it up and creates a support ticket.

great post

Help Desk
http://www.helpscout.net
Very capable and less expensive than Zendesk

Live Chat
https://snapengage.com/
Integrates with helpscout

Hire Philippines VA to handle support.