Customer Service Using Clouds and Social Networks

Customer service can make or break a company. You’ve heard how it is so much cheaper to keep an existing customer than get a new one. You’ve no doubt also heard how good customer experiences amount to free positive advertising for your company. On the other hand, one frustrated customer can do a lot of damage, especially these days when social networks make it easy to spread the venom.

Here’s the carrot and stick. Create an excellent customer service system for your company and you’ll be rewarded. Do a crummy job and you’ll be punished royally in the marketplace. Fortunately, it’s easier than ever to take the high road in customer service. What you are seeking is a ready-to-go, easy-to-use customer support system that integrates the new social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, along with traditional contact methods like email and toll free numbers. Here it is, take a look...



Does this sound like the type of system you’ve been wishing you had someone to develop? Forget paying the big bucks for a proprietary in-house system. Assistly has already done the heavy development lifting and is ready to go to work in your organization. Not so sure? No problem. Take the Assistly free trial offer and see if works for you. There’s no commitment. You don’t even need a credit card. Give it a go for 30 days and then see if you can bear the thought of giving up the best customer service tool you’ve ever used.

Assistly is fond of saying that they aren’t just about satisfying customers, but wowing them. That’s the new paradigm is an economy stuck in the doldrums. When business is booming, there’s more than enough for everyone and customers come to accept so-so service. These days customers know that their dollars are valuable and vendors are plentiful for just about anything they want to buy. If you want to stand out and be sought out by prospects and repeat customers, you need some special magic. Where better to sprinkle the magic dust than in the one part of your company that interacts the most with potential and current customers?

Assistly has a fair number of well known and respected businesses on-board with their cloud-based customer service system. Can you really afford to blow off the potential for something that can really goose your sales when they’ll let you try it a month for free? If you sell anything to the public and aren’t already thrilled with your customer service results, take a closer look at what Assistly has to offer your business.

Cloud Hosting With a Free Trial

You’ve been keeping an eye on the cloud computing phenomena for a long time. You’re thinking that it might be something that could benefit your business. Still, you're reluctant to put forth the cost, effort and commitment to give it a try. Now there’s an opportunity that might be just what you need. It’s a free trial of cloud hosting to get you started.

One easy way to get your toe into cloud services is to start with cloud hosting. Why cloud hosting? It’s a logical upgrade for a operation that has outgrown shared hosting solutions and is looking at VPS (Virtual Private Servers) and dedicated servers. The beauty of the cloud is that it offers you a flexibility and cost advantage over competing ways to host your web sites.

VPS and dedicated web servers are popular because you don’t need to make capital purchases and provide support and connectivity they way you do with running your own data center. They are one step up from the intermediate solution of colocation hosting, where you move your equipment to a public data center. The limitation of VPS and dedicated servers is that you pay a monthly fee for a bundle of resources. If you find that you have over or underestimated your requirements, you can generally upgrade or downgrade over the course of days, weeks or months.

Getting the resources right is a tricky proposition. If you order too little in the way of disk space, processing or bandwidth, you can find yourself watching hopelessly as a huge surge of viral traffic gets stopped cold by your overloaded website. The potential loss of sales can be far in excess of your monthly hosting fees. So what do you do? Take your chances or over-provision? Having all the resources you need will protect against traffic surges, but the rest of the time you are just paying to watch the disks spin.

Worse, yet, is having the type of site with wide variations in traffic and sales. You may find that your needs follow a seasonal, weekly or even daily pattern. Or perhaps no pattern at all. That’s especially true if you are a startup with the next killer app, but you don’t really know when it is going to take off or to what extent.

These are the kind of problems that cloud hosting is designed for. The cloud is a virtual environment with massive resources hidden just out of sight. If you need another server, you don’t wait for a technician to come around with a screwdriver and mount another one in your rack. You simply go to your control panel and deploy one or more in a matter of seconds. Things getting too quiet? Cancel your excess capacity and you won’t be paying for it anymore.

Atlantic.net has been providing hosting solutions since 1994 and operates a SAS 70 Type II platform that can handle large as well as modest requirements. They are making a splash in the cloud services field by setting up a system that makes it easy for just about anyone to get into cloud hosting quickly and easily.

You have your choice of Windows or Linux servers that can be deployed in less than a minute. Scale up or down in seconds, not next month. Flexible hourly billing starts at just 1.5 cents per hour and you pay only for what you use. There’s an API to control cloud servers programmability and you can add cPanel and WHM control panels to any cloud server for easy and familiar administration.

What’s your commitment level? There are no commitments, contracts or setup fees. You can cancel your servers at any time. Your data is backed-up nightly and the self-healing redundant infrastructure with automatic failover ensures availability. In fact, this cloud service comes with a 100% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA).

Does this sound like the kind of hosting that would work well for your company? Well, don’t go sign any contracts or make any commitments elsewhere until you give cloud hosting a try for free. You’ll wonder why you didn’t head to the cloud sooner.

Try Toll Free Service FREE For 14 Days

Most toll free number services are structured as pay-as-you-go. In other words, you pay for each incoming call by the minute. Often there is also a small monthly fee to maintain the service. An alternate approach enjoyed by many users of i800 Toll Free Service is to simply pay one fixed monthly fee regardless of how many toll free calls come in.

The advantage of unlimited toll free number service is that you can budget for this telephone service and know what your costs will be each month. It’s $49. For that you get to select your number from a collection of 800,866, 877 and 888 toll free numbers that are already set up and ready to use. You publish this number where it makes sense. Customers and prospective clients will call at no charge to them, which makes it more likely that they’ll pick up the phone. This is especially valuable for catalog sales, customer service and recruiting efforts.

Here’s some even better news. You can try the i800 Toll Free Service from iTeleCenter for 14 days without charge. How many telephone services will let you do that? Just attempt it with a cell phone company and listen to them scream with laughter until they point at the contract and demand signature before your phone will even work. There’s no contract to sign with i800, even after the 14 day trial period. You keep the number and the service as long as you care to pay the $49 monthly fee.

That $49 is all-inclusive. There are no surcharges, hidden fees, activation fees or per minute charges. No extra fees for features, either. You’ll get an auto attendant or main greeting, voicemail to email or text, multiple extension mailboxes, online faxing, follow me call forwarding and over 30 additional features. This is a full-featured toll free service that has everything you need to make toll free service work for your small business.

I should mention that the unlimited plan does have a fair usage provision. If you exceed 1,000 minutes per month over a 30 day period, those extra minutes will be billed at 4.9 cents per minute. This shouldn’t be a problem unless you are trying to run a large call center. This service is designed for small businesses and expects to meet their inbound toll free needs well within the rules of fair usage. If you do happen to have success beyond your wildest dreams, that 4.9 cents per minute overage is still the cheapest toll free cost you’re likely to find.

Does this sound like the kind of service that would help your business be more successful right now? Would you like to give it a try for free? If so, learn more and start your i800 unlimited toll free number service free trial .