“Enough with thinking about setting up a customer service department with customer service videos. I’m going to explore other strategies. It’s just too complicated and costly. I really don’t have time to deal with this right now. What I am taking away from reading that every small business owner should have a customer service department, is that I need a way to set up an online support desk with reliable people. This will give my business credibility, reduce cost and help me retain more customers.”

Are you struggling with these thoughts day in and day out? Are you feeling the pressure from the competition? Are they taking your clients away from you simply because their customer service is more reliable and efficient than yours? Are you at your wit’s end and don’t know what to do?

Well, I was there once myself. I remember the days when hiring and training customer service reps became a full-time job. There were no customer service videos then. The irony about it is that I was doing such a fantastic job; I became a target for my competitors. You see, as soon as I hired, licensed and trained my customer representative, large vendors in my industry would offer them a couple more dollars per hour and take them away from me. They were blatant about it. I remember talking to an insider in one of those large corporations to find out why they kept stealing my reps. The answer was that because they were trained by me, it was more than enough precedence to hire them. In some instances, they did not even have to go through the normal training. In other words, I become the freebie recruiter and trainer for these competitors.

It wasn’t just larger corporations. I remember an agency we used to work together. They covered the property and casualty business and I did the employee benefits. One day they realized they were missing out on the benefits cash cow and decided to open a benefits division. What did they do next? They offer my top customer rep literally a couple dollars an hour extra, plus flexible schedule and before I could do anything she was gone.

You may be wondering why I didn’t just increase those couple of dollars or added flexible hours so that they would not take them from me. Well, I tried, it became extremely expensive. As a small business owner, the large HR cost was already crushing me. Since my entire business model was built around customer service, it was where I concentrated most of my efforts. My mission was to convert every single one of my customers into Raving Fans. As a matter of fact, when I hired a customer rep, the first thing they had to do, before starting the job, was to read the “Raving Fans” book by Ken Blanchard…no kidding! That is what customer service really means to me.

As you can imagine the revolving door and the free training for the competition was costing me an arm and a leg. I could not continue doing the same thing, something had to change. It wasn’t just the cost, but the massive number of hours I was putting into hiring, licensing and training people. I was already putting somewhere in the vicinity of 60-70 hours a week in my business, this had to stop.

It took me a little while to figure out the answer, but eventually I did. I streamlined and digitized my entire customer service department. I digitized every thing that was paper based. I implemented intranets for each product line. I created FAQs and a knowledgebase, for both customers and service reps. This is where the customer and our employees could find answers to their frequently asked questions themselves. It worked great because clients would not have to call for every question. On the other hand, employees had the answer to customer’s questions right at their fingertips. This move alone reduced our number of phone lines from 21 to 3. It also reduced our customer reps from about 23 to 5…no kidding!

Believe it or not, it really isn’t hard to set up an efficient and inexpensive customer service department, or customer service videos. You just have to put a little time understanding virtual support systems and implement them in your business. You don’t even need to know programming or any techie speak. It’s all there for the taking, and sometimes it’s even free.