You have a company that give customer support by email? Take care of your service or it could be worse for your company than not giving the service at all. You have to take care of these points; otherwise you will probably alienate your customers:

• You need to answer really fast to your customers’ requests. It needs to be a question of some hours maximum.
• You always need to send the last email.
• You need to answer to every question, no matter what it is, silly or not.

I talk with my experience of the last weeks. I am currently searching for place where to host my next domain name and blog. I need really specific features so I asked many, many questions to many, many hosting companies. For some of them I never received any email. From others it took days before having an answer. Finally everything goes fine for some of them except that my last question is still unanswered. The result? I never found the company I will do business with to host my blog.

I think that it is a paradox, I mean, I contacted many companies specialized in blog hosting and they virtually had all bad virtual (mail, forum, etc) customer service. How could blog hosting businesses survive on the market if their customer support is as bad? A possible answer could be that no good web hosting service exist, I mean, for an acceptable monthly price (under 15$/month).

The result of this inability to answer to my questions is deep. It alienated me to their services and it is sure that I will never ever try to do business with them again. No one of these companies will have my money.

So the conclusion is simple: if you are not willing to put the time in a service you give, do not give it at all, otherwise it could be worse for your business. Internet is young; it takes time to business to adapt their strategies to it. However, you have to know that customers are already adapted to this new way to buy goods and services. They now have expectations, so you have to answer them.

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