Email The Power of Market

Posted by trust

February 10, 2008

Anyone who is operating a website for profit and has no intention of ever expanding his/her business beyond current levels should not worry too much about expanding beyond a simple CGI contact script to run their customer service and support. However, if you find yourself growing to the point of needing something better, then please keep reading.

Small business people often find themselves in the mode of needing to add extra support staff, but still being small enough to not be able to yet afford a customized support software solution.

Software driven help desks can be an expensive proposition. Wonder Desk is a decent application to serve this market, but starting at $499 and going up to $8499, it can be a really expensive solution. Facing costs like this, many small businesses choose to try bringing on extra staff and trying to manage incoming messages through various POP email accounts.

While this method remains the cheapest solution, it is not always the most efficient. Think about this.

If you have email going to Harrison and to Gregory in a theoretical scenario, and you have Harrison handling sales and Gregory handling support, all would seem well.

But what if Harrison finds himself extremely ill and unable to work? What then? Now you are stuck with the very real possibility of sales inquiries not being handled until Harrison can return to work. So the way to handle this becomes making sure that everyone has access to the accounts that handle sales inquiries and support inquiries. So, you make arrangements for both Harrison and Gregory to be able to get the email from the POP accounts.

Of course, this introduces a whole brand new problem. Now, both Harrison and Gregory are getting email from both accounts. But now, if Harrison answers an email, Gregory really has no way of knowing that Harrison has already answered the email. If both Harrison and Gregory answer the inquiry, then your company now looks as if it consists of a couple of bumbling idiots. That is definitely not the image you want to portray of your company. Additionally, you don’t want Harrison and Gregory answering inquiries that have already been answered because it is a waste of human resources.

Facing this problem, it would seem wise to use a web-based email interface. Problem here is that you will have to constantly monitor a web-based email account for new inquiries. Can you imagine the pain of relying on web-based email for the operation of your business?

Unless your web mail system contacts you immediately upon the arrival of new email, then you must maintain an open browser window to your web mail account and continually refresh the window to see if there is new email to answer.

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