Forum Moderators: buckworks
College kids might seem like a good answer, and it can be, but approach that one with care. Hire a collge student you know and trust. These are your customers. You really don't want some inexperienced, immature kid going off on them or becoming so appethetic that they no longer provide a good customer service. You might be better off looking for a stay-at-home mom whose kids have gone off to gradeschool. She will have hours during the day avaliable to come in and won't mind if the job grows, as long as she can get home by the time her kids get home. Or a retired person who is looking for something to do. They won't mind if the job grows either. You'll get the maturity and work ethic you need for this kind of job with either of those options.
I wouldn't waste my money on monster for this type of job. Place an ad in your local community newspaper. Not the local big newspaper, but the smaller local paper that serves the different neighborhoods and communities. Or, if you choose the senior route, talk to your local senior center. They will be more than happy to hook you up with seniors who are interested in working.
Donny
You are partially giving the welfare of your baby away to someone else. Who are you really going to trust with this job?
This person could make you, or break you.
For me giving up any control and putting it in the trust of others was an incredibly difficult thing to do.
I tried several solutions, many of those suggested above, and none met the standards I expected.
In the end it initially had to be someone I trusted implicitely to take care of my baby....it turned out to be my wife, then some close friends and relatives, and that built a management team that I could trust to take on some "outsiders" that were maybe of a lesser known quality.
My advice is look very close to home first, the initial appointments are the most critical to your success. Don't worry about the cost too much, a good nanny is worth every penny if you can trust them with your own life and your baby's!
[edited by: percentages at 8:08 am (utc) on Jan. 5, 2004]
Elance is the place you want to go. Make sure you have a customer support knowledge base with all possible questions/answers . With that you can just hire a guy with basic english writing skills ...
I guess for long term contracts (> 1 month) you can get people for $3-5/hour
So I want to hire a customer service person who's only job is to basically answer emails.
The quality will be sure less than yourself doing it but if the business grows the only way to scale is employing an outsider to answer mundane queries/support emails... I dont think it makes a quality difference if that outsider sits right here in USA or 1000 miles apart in south asia!
I think with training and a good existing knowledge base anyone in the world with basic IQ and basic english writing/computer skills will be able to answer 80% of the mails ...they can always forward the remaining to you
But offshore outsorcing telphone support i am skeptical :)
Whatever you decide, it would definitely be worth building a knowledge base, and seeing if some of the common issues can be pre-empted through the website.
For instance, I have an e-mail address that gets a copy of all incoming mail to customer support. I also use the same e-mail to recieve a copy of all outgoing customer support e-mails. Most of these are replys, so I only need to look at them to see what is being asked and what is being provided as a response. But I also try to match the incoming up with outgoing as well to make sure that customer support requests are being replied to and not just ignored or deleted. The fact that the customer service person knows I do this means that she usually tells me about requests she has failed to respond to and why before I find them on my own.
Have you set up a well thought out FAQ's section easily accessible from any page on your site especially the contact us page?
I was having the same problem answering emails until I organized many of the popular questions into FAQ's pages. Once I put it up online it reduced my time to about a 3rd of what I was normally required to put in.
It made a big difference for me so I thought I would share it with you. Hope it works if you have not already implemented it.
I've had a FAQ page almost since I first put my site up. If it makes as much difference as you say, I hate to think how many emails I'd be getting without it! Even with the FAQ page (plus reminders and pointers to check it first), half my emails some days are the same exact questions which are answered right there. Those now just get the automated response so I have time for complete and personal answers to the other inquiries.
I'm continuously amazed at how many people just don't read what's right in front of them, and that applies to much more than just the FAQ questions. Since being a computer user would almost require a minimum level of literacy, it must be attention span or something...
College kids might seem like a good answer, and it can be, but approach that one with care. Hire a collge student you know and trust. These are your customers. You really don't want some inexperienced, immature kid going off on them or becoming so appethetic that they no longer provide a good customer service.
No, you don't - that's why you interview just as carefully as for a hired employee, and why you are copied on all ingoing and outgoing mails, and why whoever the person is gets some solid training in what you do and how they're to interact with the lifeblood of your biz.
It is definitely something to be careful with. Going for a college student can also be a huge boon for you too though, if you think about more than just customer service.
If you have a university or community college in your area, find out what sort of intern programs they have setup. Most unis have a career center or something similar, and pretty much every department is going to have an internship setup for their students.
I'd look at this as not just customer service. A student who's studying business, business writing, communications etc., might be a good match, depending on what you setup.
If it were me, I'd look at what else I'd like someone to do. Customer service, yes. And I don't mean the filing or coffee-making - most unis get pretty irked if someone tries to bring in an intern as just an unpaid temp. But could that intern help you write some new copy for the site? Or examine competing sites and give you analyses of what that business does? Then, then you might be on to something.
Sticky me if you'd like to get more in-depth; I've worked with quite a few interns, and by giving them some real work that gave them solid experience, as well as giving my firm some great content and useful internal info, it was a boon to everyone involved.
Again, I don't mean that in a bad way, it's just that a lot of the time they do not have the proper english and/or communication skills for the job.
Any generalisation that people from non-English speaking countries are unable to communicate properly in English is pompous, ill-founded and insulting.
I often get to read the work of people who studied in British schools, who graduated from British universities, and who have degrees in English. What I find appalling is that most of them have a poor grasp of grammar, an inability to string a sentence together, and a total disregard for spell checkers. They persist in using "your" when they mean "you're", can't seem to understand that "you" is plural and "you was" is therefore incorrect, and use apostrophes with the gay abandon of an illiterate grocer.
Perhaps I come from a non-English speaking country, perhaps I do not have any formal qualifications in English, perhaps there are mistakes in this post, but I can give you one assurance: you will find more people in India who can write clear, unambiguous, grammatically correct English than you will find in all of England.
You do say that "a lot of the time they do not have the proper english...skills". Isn't it then just a matter of finding someone who does have the skills? :-)
Neither do plenty of service agents in the US. I'm sure we've all been on the phone with US-based reps who could hardly get the words out, much less make them cohesive. It's not a matter of nationality, it's a matter of education and training.
If you did go with an overseas firm, wouldn't you want to check their communications quality anyway? Wouldn't you want to hear for yourself how they sound on the phone and know what training up-front and ongoing they receive? No different from choosing a firm in the US. If you're going to entrust them with your customers, then wherever they are you want to check them out as thoroughly as possible.
