Delegate Your Customer Support

Posted by BSETC on Sep 2, 2010 in Outsourcing 101, Things to Delegate | 0 comments

Problem: Your customer support inquiries are starting to pile up and answering the e-mails is taking up far too much time. You know your customers are top priority but e-mailing each of them and giving them each the time they deserve is time consuming.

Solution: Ask your VA if he/she does customer support! If this is part of their service offering, ask them to do one of two things.

1. They can setup your e-mail to forward into an account such as Google Mail and then they can answer e-mail from that account on your behalf (and you have access to it so you can see what is being answered and what is coming in!) or
2. Set yourself up with a service such as Kayako Support Center and utilize all of its functionality. This will allow you to appear quite professional for your customer base.

Tips: Whichever method you use for your customer support, make sure the person doing support keeps a running document of stock responses. The reason I suggest this is because in future, if you need to train someone new or you need to have someone cover for vacation, you have an operations manual for the customer support side of the business.

The best way to do this is to add all of the most common responses to a document and add to it as you go along. One format I have used in the past would be this (example only):

Question: How long does it take before I will receive my order?

Response: Hello!

Thank you for your recent e-mail. In response to your question, we ship out all orders within 24 hours of receiving the order notice. Depending on where you are in the US, you may receive it in 2-4 days.

If you do not receive it in one week from now, please give us a call at (555) 555-5555 and we’d be glad to track down the order for you.

Sincerely,

Customer Support

Delegate Your Info-Product Creation

Posted by BSETC on Aug 31, 2010 in Outsourcing 101, Things to Delegate | 0 comments

Problem: You want to begin creating info-products for your customers but you aren’t sure where to begin and the thought of creating something like that overwhelms you.

Solution: Forward your VA all of the content you currently have. This content could come from your newsletters, e-zines, free reports, operations manuals, etc. Anything that you have documented or written could potentially be compiled into an e-book.

The thing to remember is that you should be leveraging your knowledge so that you continue to create more focused, creative time for yourself. If your VA has e-book layout and production skills, he/she can produce you an info-product based on content you already have!

Tips: When you are looking at having someone else ‘ghostwrite’ an info-product for you, make sure you set clear guidelines. Here are some questions to ask yourself first:

• Do I want someone who will compile the entire info-product for me?
• Do I need brand new content written?
• What sort of information would someone need to do this for me?
• How vital is it that I do the entire product creation?

By answering these questions, you’ll be able to answer the question of “Is this something I can delegate out?” Compilation of data is easy to give someone else to do but entire product creation is not always as easy.

One thing your VA can definitely do for you (or at least most VAs I know should be able to do this) is format your data so it is “pretty” and is in standard e-book format. Standard e-book format means cover page, table of contents, nice layout, graphics, etc.

Delegate Your Landing Page Setup

Posted by BSETC on Aug 27, 2010 in Outsourcing 101, Things to Delegate | 0 comments

Problem: Creating landing pages for joint ventures is taking up too much time – not to mention the technical, web side of things. You need these landing pages to be able to convert prospects from someone else’s list to yours (usually by offering a free product on the other side of that!)

Solution: If your VA has web design experience, get him/her to setup your landing page with an opt-in, confirmation box and let them connect with the contact at your joint venture’s company. All you would need to do is provide some content for the page and the VA can do the rest!

Not only does this take the task off of your desk, it allows your VA to take a marketing approach to the landing page.

Tips: A landing page, in case you aren’t familiar with one, is a page that is used in a joint venture.

Generally what happens is that the person you are collaborating with will put together a promotion and you’ll do the same and you’ll direct people to a page where they need to enter their name and e-mail address to receive whatever it is you are giving away or doing (a teleconference or an ebook for example).

When doing ANY type of promotion with someone else, make sure you can capitalize on it and collect e-mail addresses for your list too! In internet marketing, your list means everything and you want to be sure you can market to these people again in future.

Landing pages are easy to setup and the great part is that once you setup one landing page, you can copy the ‘shell’ and just modify it to reflect the current promotion you are doing.