Online Tools to Reduce Down Cost of Customer Service for Your SME

For any Small and Medium Enterprise customer service is a challenge to be addressed. Large businesses can afford to maintain dedicated customer care departments and can hire people to specifically respond to customers on time. For Small and Medium enterprises though, this is a challenge to reckon with.

Many of our partner SMEs have previously posed customer services as one of the major impending operational challenges. For any SME maintaining customer relationships while providing best of class service is difficult.

What is the challenge with Customer Service for SMEs?
The challenge with customer service for SMEs are multiple:

• sustaining a customer service team dedicated to resolving any issues in time, everytime
• charting out efficiency of the resolutions
• taking customer feedback on an on-going basis at all times
• creating, maintaining and sustaining a proper process for assigning tickets to the relevant customer service professionals in the team

All these are challenges which come associated with customer service as a business objective are tough to be solved by small and emerging companies.

How to create a scalable customer service solution?

Internet again comes to help! There are many tools online which can help you set up a process oriented customer service set-up without much hassles. Depending upon your size, if you are a start-up/ budding organization, you might not even need a dedicated resource to really service your customers.

An online help-desk solution is the answer to all your customer service problems. One such interesting application is Zendesk which is an online help desk software solution. 

What is Zendesk?

Zendesk is a web based help desk software with an inbuilt support ticket system and a self service customer support platform.

Zen Desk works like any other customer service/ support department of an organisation. It creates a virtual (online) customer support for your organisation and helps you address customer complaints while setting a process for the same.

How can I start?

Zen Desk allows a free 30 day trial of their product and hence you can try the product and see its features for free before actually thinking of investing your money for the same. Once you login to your Zen Desk account the first landing page that you reach to is your dashboard which lets you access everything of the software and support multiple clients. Refer the screen capture below to have a look at the dashboard:

You can always customize your customer service online help desk with your own branding (logo, colors) etc. To start with you need to create a pool of knowledge oriented resources for your customers to see as a self help portal. You can do this by clicking on the button called 'forums' at the bottom of the screen.

Once done, you must now start defining rules on the platform, with the help of the 'manage' tab on the top menu.

Once the 'manage' options are set and defined, the platform is ready to be used for extending customer service to the customers online with defined support options.

How does this help SMEs?

For small and medium enterprises such online platforms are a boon as they help in creating a process oriented structure for emerging enterprises to deliver quality customer support services.

To know more on leveraging online tools for business success, drop in a comment to this post OR contact our team of experts at the IndiaMART Knowledge Services!