The dirty little secret that will cut down your customer service questions and free up your time
I’m a big fan of automating everything I can in our business. When I find myself spending time on tasks in my business that could be done by someone who makes a lot less than my calculated hourly value, I either delegate it or automate it.
The first question I ask myself is —
Can I automate this?
If the task is something I can automate, I prioritize getting the automation set up. If I can’t automate it, I delegate it.
As a business owner selling products and services, one of the big time-suckers is providing personal customer service. It’s critical that our customers feel valued and get their questions and issues dealt with quickly and completely.
Many of our clients are on a continuity program with us for services they use regularly. That means their credit card is charged by our company monthly or annually.
Keeping the credit card information up-to-date in our ecommerce platform used to require diligence and lots of time spent in phone calls and emails.
Ugh, it was so-o-o time consuming, tedious, and repetitious. That set off loud bells we couldn’t ignore.
The first thing we did was configure billing automation in our ecommerce platform. That automatically sends a link to the client so they can update their credit card information when the charge fails. Often it’s a simple a fix as updating the expiration date or CVV code.
Spoiler alert! Here’s the magic!
We created a client-facing app where the client can log in to a special area of our website and update their credit card information directly. JoomFuse with JFPortal integrates our Joomla website with Infusionsoft tightly and securely.
It’s all about teaching your clients to fish instead of handing them the fish.
We now have so few customer service calls or personal emails about updating credit cards that we actually don’t think about it anymore.
One of our clients told us that her customer service calls decreased by over 40% immediately after installing JoomFuse with JFPortal.
Gotta love automation!