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In this final piece of a four part article series on customer service we look at one of the key components of a successful Internet business - a good customer support person.

If you have been following along this journey you will remember how Starbucks taught us the importance of good customer service as a powerful tool for reputation management, which can lead to a competitive advantage in the marketplace.

We then switched to the Internet business world and followed along the typical path of a solo entrepreneur growing an online empire. With success comes pressure to continue to deliver personalized support, despite less time available to do so. In the end one person can only do so much, and customer service suffers.

In the most recent article I went back in time and reviewed my own personal experience developing various Internet projects and how I evolved the system I use to interact with my constituents. The major conclusion of this piece was the importance of Angela, my customer service person.

Now let’s take a look how you can take the next step with your business and outsource your customer service role.

Start With A System

It’s likely you will begin by providing customer support yourself, especially if you work your way up as an independent operator. Along the way you can install a help desk or set up a customer support email account. You may go as far as replicating the ReplytoYaro.com support system I use.

The previous article looked at a several technology options available to you to implement a system for online customer support. I suggest you use my story as inspiration to build your own support system, and while you do, think about how eventually another person (or people) can run it for you.

Most help desk scripts are built for multiple users and as I explained in the prior article, a Gmail email is a great basic solution to get started and can also handle multiple users through the use of message flagging.

Once you have something set up, your next task is to find a customer support officer.

How I Find Good People

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This is the third part in a four part series of articles on customer service.

In part one we looked at a example from Starbucks customer service, where a simple free beverage voucher left a lasting positive impression on me. You can read this article here - Reputation Management: Starbucks Offers A Simple Lesson In Good Customer Service.

In part two I walked you through the typical “growing pains” of a solo entrepreneur running an Internet business attempting to deliver personal customer service and how often as a result of success, things start to fall apart. You can read this article here - Growing Pains: How To Manage Customer Service As A One Person Enterprise.

In this next part of the series, as promised, I’m going to give you a behind the scenes tour of how I handled customer service through various different Internet projects I’ve owned in the past eight years. My system today is far from perfect, but it’s definitely much better than what it was. My current set-up allows me to have time freedoms and still look after my most important constituents (most of the time anyway!).

Starting From The Beginning

To fully put this into perspective we have to take a trip down memory lane way back to the beginning of my Internet business timeline (still one of the most popular article series on this blog and overdue for an update to add the last couple of years).

My first true success online was my popular Magic card game site, MTGParadise.com started in the late nineties. I created that site as a true newbie. I learned how to FTP, code HTML, create basic graphics and spent countless nights changing my website.

To start with I wrote content for the website myself and learned some basic Internet marketing techniques to bring in traffic, which pretty much amounted to link exchanges and regular participation in popular Magic newsgroups (this was a LONG time ago, back in the Usenet heyday when newsgroups were the Internet).

My site grew slowly, but with no benchmarks to really compare against I was happy enough with my few hundred daily visitors, adding another ten or twenty new readers per month, treating the project purely as a hobby.

Eventually I started to receive guest articles from other people who played the card game, which helped lesson my writing load. I spent most of my time back then struggling to make HTML do what I wanted to do and did not write nearly as much as I do now as a blogger and information product creator.

My Magic site didn’t become a big success until I added a forum to it. I made the decision on a whim because Magic players, at least in Australia, were used to using email newsgroups to communicate with and spent the rest of their time reading static websites. There wasn’t a forum out there at the time for Australia magic players because they were content with newsgroups, which had a critical mass of users.

I didn’t exactly see this as a business opportunity at the time. What I was interested in was playing with the forum script and seeing if I could get it to work (I was a real glutton for punishment back then, wasting time trying to make technology work when I wasn’t a coder). I certainly did not expect what would happen next.

My First Taste of Success

One of the reasons I enjoyed Magic had nothing to do with playing the game. What I loved was to trade cards. As an entrepreneur at heart, sometimes I preferred the act of performing commerce rather than playing the game, so I did see the potential for my forum to become a hub for card trading. I just didn’t expect it to become THE card trading site for Australian Magic game players - but it did.

Within a few months the forums began to really take off thanks to the increasingly active card trading community.

If you can create a site that is based on user generated content fueled by a strong hook - a reason for people to come back to the site every day - well, then you have struck gold in Internet business terms. Many multi-million dollar web business today are based on this principle (think eBay, Facebook, YouTube).

My Magic site did not become a multi-million dollar business, but it did carve out it’s own little corner in a very specific niche. As a result my traffic grew to over a thousand visitors a day, which I joked was probably the entire online population of Magic players in Australia (it’s a popular card game, but Australia doesn’t have a large population). I made my first real online income thanks to advertising sponsors on MTGParadise.com.

If you are interested to learn more about how I made money with my Magic site, see - How to make money from your website using advertising.

The Empire Starts To Grow

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In my previous post about Starbucks reputation management we looked at how a few good customer service systems can be used as a marketing strategy to encourage word of mouth and result in a competitive advantage.

In the case of people like me and many of you, my readers, we operate Internet businesses that largely are a product of our own personal brand. We are entrepreneurs, bloggers, consultants, contractors or freelancers, and much of the customer service responsibility rests on our shoulders.

Being an independent operator or small business owner does not mean you can let the ball drop on good customer service. In this case reputation management is just as important since your business lives and dies on your ability to deliver what you promise and leave a lasting impression.

For a small business with a limited marketing budget, good customer service resulting in an above average reputation in the market, can result in acquiring new customers through existing client referrals - a “free” form of marketing.

During the start-up phase you have limited funds and one of the best strategies to survive this period of business growth is to use your existing clients as a marketing tool to bring in new clients (actually - this is a good strategy at any stage of business growth).

The cornerstone of achieving that outcome is good customer service, since your existing clients will not be willing to help you, nor will they feel compelled to talk about you and refer you to others, if they are not significantly impressed by - and benefit from - their interaction with your business.

Good customer service combined with a superior product can evoke a sense of reciprocity from your customers. They genuinely want your business to succeed, so much so that they go out of their way to endorse you. People like to spread things they consider valuable because in turn they enjoy the perception of being valuable as well. Most humans desire recognition from other humans - it’s a core human drive - and if you can loop your business into this motivation you have tapped the secret of word of mouth marketing.

Growing Pains As A Solo Business Owner or Blogger

I’ve worked independently all my life. Most of the first five years of my business experience were completely solo because I had the mentality that I needed to do things myself in order to save money.

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I was traveling around Queen Street West in downtown Toronto this week and as always I popped into a Chapters bookshop (like a Borders). In Canada most bookshops have either a Starbucks or a Second Cup coffee shop. Many of the posts in this blog were created in cafes inside bookshops around the world.

I ordered a tea and an oat brownie from Starbucks. The brownie was delivered instantly, but the tea wasn’t, so I walked over to the delivery end of the cafe and waited.

The customers just before me received their order and I expected mine next. The customers who ordered after me then walked up and collected their coffees. Then the next customer. Clearly my tea wasn’t coming.

I walked back around to the cashier section and spoke to the barista who took my order. He immediately realized that he had forgotten about the tea and in two seconds flat, made my tea and then blurted out something about a free tea and handed me a piece of cardboard that looked like this -

In case you can’t read the print, here’s the bit that matters…

Besides the funky design of this free beverage voucher, there’s nothing too groundbreaking about offering something for free when you don’t get good service, but let’s look at this a little deeper.

I waited about an extra minute longer for my tea than I should have. That is definitely not long enough for me to get angry and I was served very quickly once I notified them that my tea was missing.

Yet, despite this, the Starbucks policy is to offer a complimentary beverage even if their system is slightly out of whack. I walked away impressed that I scored a free beverage voucher, but not really because of the beverage itself, I was impressed with the customer service policy I just witnessed (hence I’m writing a blog post about it!).

Starbucks did not diminish in my eyes as a result of this incident. In fact they impressed me, so much so that I’m now writing a blog post that will be read by thousands of people proclaiming good things about Starbucks service (that’s some good word of mouth). Of course not every Starbucks customer has a blog they can rave to when something happens, but every person has friends and people they talk to, and this one policy of Starbucks will encourage word of mouth through normal social interaction too.

Standing Out In A Crowded Marketplace

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I remember my first website sale. I made $13,000 Australian dollars selling a website that I had built from scratch myself. That sale was a big windfall for me and a moment I won’t forget because it was the first time I saw the real potential of online property investment.

Since that sale I’ve gone on to sell more than $150,000 USD in websites. Some of the sites I built myself, investing my own time and sometimes money, while others I have purchased and then sold for a profit at a later date.

I’ve never lost money on a website investment, although I have bought some sites that were not big money spinners - I got out with pretty much the same as I went in with. When profits are made though, the worst I have done is double my money.

Long Term Investing?

On the Internet you might call what I do long term investing since most of the sites I bought were sold no earlier than 18 months time. The websites I built myself take as long as five years to reach the point of sale, although I could have sold earlier for less or held on longer for more.

The best return on investment from a flip (a site bought and later sold) was 1,000% - 10 times the money I put in. It took a little over two years to do that. Another trade was a set of sites I purchased 18 months prior that brought in a little over double my initial investment.

In the offline world, returns like that in 18 and 24 months would be considered exceptional and certainly not standard. If a share portfolio or investment in physical property returns 20% a year you are doing well.

The world of the web is different. Everything is changing fast, yet with so many websites and so many people online, the size and potential of the market is tremendous. There are bargains out there all the time and as long as you don’t screw up what you purchase, simply allowing a site to grow organically can result in significant profits, if you are prepared to wait.

Flipping Part Time

I’ve never focused all my energy on buying and selling websites, which is why I haven’t done that many trades. Most of the time I work on whatever my main business projects are at the time, but I keep my eyes on some of the website trading forums to see if bargains come up.

When a site matches my criteria, I act fast with an offer, do some basic due diligence and if all things go well, make a deal. I miss out on more sites than I purchase because other people out-bid me, the site sells before I find it or due diligence convinces me to pass on a particular site.

As a result of buying websites purely as a side project, I’ve focused on a certain type of website and made sure I have people working with me who can help with the activities I don’t have the time to do. You definitely need to be careful if you want website flipping to be a part time job, it can quickly suck all your time, especially if you choose the wrong type of site.

Criteria for Part Time Website Flipping

Here’s some advice from what I have learned in the previous years flipping websites part time.

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