In my post Why you Definitely Need To Outsource I talked about having somebody handle your emails for you. In this post, I'm going to discuss another option called the help desk.
Let's face it, when your business starts to grow, so does the number of inquiries that you will have. Some will be actual problems that need to be taken care of. As hard as we all try, problems do occur and customers want to be taken care of as quickly as possible. That's where the help desk can be a life saver.
A help desk is nothing more than an area that your customers log into in order to register their issues. They can range from anything from inquiries to trouble reports.
The good thing about help desks is that you don't have to worry about emails not getting through, which will happen because of all the spam filters that are floating around on all the ISPs. With a help desk, when the person puts in their issue, they are given a claim number. The help desk will send them an email confirming this, but they might not get it.
Now, days go by and the customer hasn't heard anything. In the meantime, you've replied to the issue. The problem is, they didn't receive your email. But that's okay. They still have their claim number. All they have to do is login to the help desk and they can see that their claim was responded to. They can then look to see what that response was. This almost totally removes the possibility of customer becoming irate because they didn't receive an answer to their problem.
Once your business starts to grow, a help desk can be a literal life saver. The monthly costs of running one are very small. You can even purchase your own software to run your own, right on your server,
Aside from outsourcing things like web design or other services that are one shot deals, you also want to outsource things that you do on a daily basis that don't directly earn you money. Why? Well, think about it. If you're spending your time doing something that isn't directly earning you money, then you are in fact losing money, because you could have been spending that time doing something like working in a new project or writing a new ad for an existing one. You want to do as few things as possible that don't directly make you money. So when you sit down to do anything, ask yourself, “Is this making me money?” If the answer is NO, then get somebody else to do it.
Take a look at Donald Trump. Look at all the buildings he owns. Do you think this man ever laid a brick in his life? Do you think he even knows how to mix cement? Donald Trump is the master of outsourcing. He takes his money and puts it to work for him where it can do the most good. And a lot of that is having other people do the work for him.
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