Here to help: Phone & Livechat Support
Don’t you hate it when Internet companies are the WORST at customer support. They hide their phone number, bury where they are located, and typically make you jump through millions of hoops, just to get a hold of them. Well we hate the too. Our goal at SocialGuides is to make social media easy and useful for businesses. We certainly can’t do that well if a customer can’t get a hold of us. So we’ve decided to make it part of our mission to be as available as possible. Starting now you can call us toll free at 1-877-337-5678 or LiveChat with us directly within the product.
I personally love the LiveChat concept. Anytime you have a question, idea, concern, or whatever while using SocialGuides you simply click the button on the right and someone will be there to talk you through things in a matter of seconds. It’s so easy to do, and it’s really reassuring knowing help is right next to you. Selfishly, of course, we love it too because by talking to our customers, it helps us make better products (well i guess that’s not completely selfish is it?). For now SocialGuides LiveChat is running 9am - 6pm pst (and you can leave a message if we aren’t online). Hopefully someday we’ll be able to run it 24-7. Right now though, its cool to know when you hit us up, you aren’t talking to some person in another country, you are talking to one of our engineers, product managers, or perhaps even one of the founders.
Of course you can also call us, because sometimes there’s no substitute for a good old fashion voice conversation. Did you hear that big silly internet companies? There’s no substitute for a good old fashion voice conversation.
Now, if you run an online company and jive with our mantra of trying to be always available for customers, you might be wondering how we run both services. Well with LiveChat we use a product called Plupper, which offers both livechat and help desk type capabilities (support logging, faqs, etc). We’ve used a bunch of the other ones and found that Plupper had the best balance of the features we needed and a great pricing structure. Other online support tools we’ve heard good things about are: Banckle, GetSatisfaction, Olark, UserVoice, and Zopim. For our phone support we use a great product called Grasshopper. There are other good products that have virtual pbx features like RingCentral and Onebox but we haven’t used either system so you’ll have to check them out yourself.
Whichever products you choose, we can’t encourage you enough to look for as many ways as possible to be customer centric. Sometimes that will be with support products like Plupper & GetSatisfaction, sometimes that will be with social products like SocialGuides (shameless plug) & Assistly (a cool social help desk), and sometimes it will be with good old fashion voice or a handwritten note. No matter what the method of choice is though (and we can’t say this enough) - we believe whether you are a growing bakery, a social software startup, or an established eCommerce company, helping people should be at the core of who you are and what you do.
