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Help Desk with an Upsell?

by Emailrevealer
4 replies
  • WEB DESIGN
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Hre's my problem.
I'm a private investigator and my web site is The Email Tracing Experts, Online Infidelity and Cyber Stalking Investigations and Reverse Email Search.
Most of the services I offer on my site are a flat fee but some are billed hourly.
The flat fee searches do not include consultaions. I charge $75 an hour for consultations.

Now some clients will receive the results of their investigation and have a few simple polite questions and I have no problem helping out and just chalking it off to customer service but then there are others that just don't get it.

Usually clients from the UK or Canada just don't understand the concept of billable hours for consultation or follow up investigative work. They seem to think they can get hours of follow up work for free.

I'd like to impliment a "Help Desk" program that would take the place of the "Contact Me" button. So when they go thru the contact process they would be warned that email consultaion is billable time. I'd also like to have them agree to these terms and conditions before being able to submit a question and also be prompted to enter their credit card information so there is no missunderstanding that email consultaions are billable hours.
#desk #upsell
  • Profile picture of the author awesometbn
    Originally Posted by Emailrevealer View Post

    I'd like to impliment a "Help Desk" program that would take the place of the "Contact Me" button. So when they go thru the contact process they would be warned that email consultaion is billable time. I'd also like to have them agree to these terms and conditions before being able to submit a question and also be prompted to enter their credit card information so there is no missunderstanding that email consultaions are billable hours.
    I'm glad you asked about this, because I was working on a similar problem for a client of mine. Take a look at Ether.com from AT&T. They have a system that allows people to pay to connect to you. It's free to use, but they subtract a percentage fee before paying you. Excellent for consulting, tech support, etc. For telephone calls, they act as a third party, so the telephone numbers on both sides (yours and the client) are anonymous.

    Another idea is to partner with one of those websites that provide free answers to all kinds of questions. Use them as your backend tech support, that is crowdsourced, surrounded by your own upsell if they want more specific help with the services you offer. Let us know what you decide to do. Thanks.
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  • Profile picture of the author mywebwork
    Originally Posted by Emailrevealer View Post

    Usually clients from the UK or Canada just don't understand the concept of billable hours for consultation or follow up investigative work.
    I'm puzzled - you only have this problem with Canadian and British clients but not the American ones?

    Could you just place a PayPal "Buy Now" link or button on your site and charge them in advance for the follow-up work? Let them know that they are buying a finite amount of your time (perhaps an hour) and that if they exceed it you will require them to pay again before you continue.

    Bill
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  • Profile picture of the author dawnpeterson
    Hi,

    You can create a help desk relatively easily with your cpanel options, but to customize it to force an agreement, then capture their credit card info will take a bit more experience. If you need someone to walk you through it, send me a pm and we can talk about some of your options.

    Dawn.
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  • Profile picture of the author seomark09
    If you integrate it right, WHCS has a upsell feature, I used it when I had my hosting company going. You would just have to tweak it to make it work for whatever type of product.
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