Quality Education

Help Desk Software Can Improve Your Online Business

Nobody likes a dumb question. This includes the members of your online business team who ensure that customer complaints are met with helpful answers. Unfortunately, most customers are so excited to use their new product that they neglect to educate themselves with the user manual. These same frustrated customers will call support with questions that are easily answered, tying up the phone lines as customers with more complex complaints anxiously wait.
However, there is a solution – it’s called help desk software or customer support software. This software is designed to either help customers help themselves or to assist customers in contacting technical support. There are a couple ways that help desk software accomplishes this task.
Most customer support software will include a list of frequently asked questions (FAQ). An FAQ is a relatively short list of some of the most common questions that are asked of customer support and their answers. When customers first use help desk software, they should be exposed to a program or self-help list which will attempt to answer their questions before they ever get a chance to make a call.
Most major retailers are performing this task today by funneling customers needing support into a short questionnaire or troubleshooting session, handled by software, which will either answer the customer’s question or display contact information for phone support.
There is another option which separates the customer from costly phone support – text support in the form of chat messaging and email. The email option allows support teams to handle customer questions on their own time, allowing for more efficiency in handling complaints. It also allows more severe complaints to be handled before all others as support employees can choose which complaints they address first.
Chat messaging does not offer this triage effect for severity of complaints, but it does connect customers and support employees in a way that minimizes wait times and confusion. When on the phone, poor connections and differing accents can result in many poorly transmitted messages causing confusion and frustration. However, text is always clear and, in most cases, understood.
So you see, help desk software can do wonders for your company’s online business. While your competitors’ support teams are gridlocked with customers asking simple questions, you can educate your customers on how to use your product without even answering a complaint.
As your competitors’ support teams struggle to hear customers with bad cell phone reception or different accents than their own, your support employees will be sending satisfied, educated customers on their way. In business it all boils down to who can provide the most value to their customers. By contemplating adding help desk software to your online business, you may give your company the edge it needs to outclass the competition.

Department Of Education Website

Articles Vs Press Releases For An Online Marketing Strategy

If you are in the process of creating an effective online advertising and marketing campaign you should understand the differences between articles and press releases. Both these concepts have advantages for attracting more visitors to a website. If you have limited time and money to devote to your campaign, take a moment to discover which option should best be used and why.
An article is a document that you would create and submit to an online directory. The information it contains should be interesting to the viewer and in some way relevant to the products or services you offer through your portal. In the article you can place links to your website so that an interested party can be redirected to your home page.
Depending upon the directory chosen, an article can be topical and opinionated, but keep in mind that most directories do not want articles that are overly promotional. The main point of the document should be to provide information to the reader.
Article marketing has many benefits. For example, it offers a huge reach that is not possible with other forms of advertising. Also it can be used to increase search engine optimization, this is essential today in the highly competitive online world. If you can submit information with a back link to your site, which is then ranked highly by the mains search engines, be ready to receive a huge amount of traffic.
Press releases are also a useful tool to integrate into your marketing strategy. They differ in a number of ways from articles. A press release is not general; it would carry information relating to a specific product, service, event, or offer. For example, if you have a website that sells clothing you can send out a press release when you have a new range of stock.
They are only of value in the short term as the data they carry can quickly become redundant, this is not the case with articles as the information they contain can be of interest for many years. Both articles and press releases have the benefit of being able to be picked up by other sites and blogs. In fact there are certain portals that would be interested in carrying your press releases as it can attract more traffic to their own web pages.
The way in which articles and press release are constructed and submitted is dramatically different. An article can talk in detail and at length on a particular subject or topic whereas a press release should be brief and to the point. For an article to be approved by a directory the grammar and sentence construction must adhere to traditional English language concepts. A press release on the other hand can be structured in an easy to digest format.
Which option would best suit your needs would depend upon your overall aim. If you are after a long term interest from internet users, articles may be preferable, whereas if you want to receive a high number of visitors in the short term opt for creating press releases.

Public Education

Computer Problems Can Kill Your Online Business

It has recently been brought to my attention that one of the major obstacles that some people have to making money online is a serious lack of computer knowledge and expertise that often leads to computer problems. Not so much that they are “computer stupid” as some have told me, but as I tell them, they are simply uninformed. I have seen a few get a brand new computer and boldly go out there with nothing to protect them from viruses, adware, malware and the mirad of things out there that plague us all.
They get out here on the net, totally uninformed that these dangers exist and want to get started in an online business. They figure it out right away that the internet is a golden opportunity to start up an online business with very little start up costs and they end up with computers so virused that they can’t do anything except stare at a screen offering them an anti-virus program that is actually a part of the virus that infected them in the first place, or their computer is so slowed down by adware that their brand new computer can barely move from one page to another.
Now that is good for me on the one hand, because as a side line, I fix their problems for a nominal fee, but on the other hand, you know it would be so much nicer for everyone if they never had the problems at all.
I’ve had to tell some that they needed to take their computer into a specialist to remove all of the virus from their computer before any anti virus program could be added to their computer. (After all, how many can I fix in a day?) A few of them I have cleaned myself, but more often than not, I have reformatted the hard drives and reinstalled windows for them and helped them to set up to not have the issue again. Some of the newest bugs out there are just that nasty.
When it comes to your anti virus program, personally, I hate the freebies. You know that some tools are only worth what you pay for them and if they are free and something goes wrong, you know that the freebie can’t afford a support desk to help out the customer.
My personal favorites for anti-virus programs are McAfee and Norton. They are still the top two out there and when it comes to anti-virus, personally, I wouldn’t mess around with anything less than one of the best. A good anti virus will take care of spyware, and adware plus have a good firewall to keep trojans at bay. I have found these two over the years to be all that I needed for all of the intrusion issues.
When it comes to my registry and other issues, I use some free toys, but I also use the reasonably priced things that there are out there. Cleaning your registry at least once a month is one way to keep things moving smoothly on your computer as the registry is the tool that tells your computer where the files are stored. It tells it how a file relates to a program and where to find it. Basically, the registry is a map your computer follows to a file or folder or dll that tells it either what to do next or what file to bring up for you. It would really be sad to try to bring up a picture of Aunt Jane and have a picture of Uncle George come up instead, as an example. Now what if you remove that program and the registry doesn’t get the changed? Or you moved all of your pictures from your hard drive to a back up system or another device? Using a registry cleaner will remove all of the invalid paths that can result and speed up your computer by the virtue that it is no longer searching or tripping over maps to files that are no longer in the same place.
In summary, it doesn’t matter if you are planning an online business or not. Take care of your computer with a great anti virus program and just some general maintenance tools. It will keep you happier with the performance of your computer, and save you and probably a good technician a lot of time being frustrated with a computer that has just gotten all kinds of mucked up.