Time to quit smoking? Having trouble managing stress? Need to drop a few pounds? SelfHelpWorks.com can help.
The San Diego, CA-based company produces online seminars to help customers overcome their personal problems. For 20 years, it conducted them in person, but in 2000 it went virtual.
That is, it started conducting the sessions online, and tried to shift some of its communications from phone to e-mail. This provided immediate benefits for customers and cost savings for the company, but it also posed challenges. How could the firm maintain the personal touch with customers who have questions about the programs—or just want to talk?
SelfHelpWorks didn’t have enough staff to provide phone-based, round-the-clock customer support. And personal issues weren’t the only things that people wanted to talk about: They also called about expired credit cards, client subscription changes and annoyance over pop-up ads.
And that was a problem. The deluge of phone calls began tying employees up on calls all day. “It was killing us,” says Bruce Lawrence, former vice president of operations. “At the time there were only six of us in the office. When you’re a small business, you don’t have rich enough resources to handle the number of calls we were getting.” But Lawrence knew that customer care was critical for an online counseling service. So he sought out an alternate way to handle communications.
He brought aboard Help Desk, a Web-based subscription solution featuring the Email Manager tool from elementool.com. Prior to using Help Desk, the company employees spent between 20 and 30 hours a week apiece on customer support. Now they spent maybe half that, and that isn’t the only benefit.
“A phone call could take 15 to 20 minutes where an e-mail could take 30 seconds,” Lawrence says. For the cost of approximately $80 a month, Lawrence is able to answer many customer inquiries online through frequently asked questions. With the help of Email Manager, incoming e-mails were placed in a queue for customer service representatives. When the issue had been handled, a record of it was logged for future reference. “For a small company you have real savings and professional handling of the customer,” says Lawrence. “Resolving issues used to take days. Now it takes only hours.”
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