Hire staff and/or make additional preparations for customer support (remote email solutions, cell phone, etc.)
Well, you’re in business. The very first customer will sign up soon. You set up a support helpdesk earlier, but are you monitoring the signup notifications and helpdesk tickets all the time? Make preparations so that you monitor everything. Sales requests, signups, support tickets – you need to be able to answer those in an acceptable time frame. If you are still employed somewhere else and have Internet access – perfect. But if not you need to hire help or ask friends and family to help out.
Put a system in place that allows you to respond in a decent matter. An email enabled cell phone is a perfect choice if available – I personally would not sign up for it in the beginning unless I would already have it. Stay away from adding unneeded cost to your business.
So, what can you do to get your business going and still work for your existing employer? Try to automate things. Automation makes it look like that you are actually out there doing something – running your business. If you are selling domain names – automate it. There are plenty of scripts and software packages out there that will do this for you. Setup a helpdesk software that includes a knowledge base. Fill the knowledge base with knowledge and how to information. Reduce the exposure of getting a helpdesk ticket for a simple question not being answered in your knowledge base.
If you cannot access email from work but if you have access to your corporate email – use forwarders on your own email and have messages being forwarded to work. At least you know what is going on and do not have to worry about open tickets or a new user signing-up. If worst comes to worse you would be able to reply from the corporate email (I still do not recommend doing this.) Ask friends for help. If you know somebody who has web access during the day while you work and is willing to help out – forward the message to him or her. Prepare those friends with email templates and knowledge of what to do. A new account can be set up easily – maybe even via a script that your friend can execute with the information provided. You have to plan for these contingencies though… have some people you can trust lined up in case you need them. You could also check emails before you go to work. Visit a library at lunch for Internet access and check email and work on tickets. As soon as you get home after work – dedicate some time to check email and to work on tickets.
Cost associated with this step: $0.00
Money spend so far: $704.93 (one-time)
Money spend so far: $45.00 (recurring per month)
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