On Monday, I put this question out to my Twitter followers. Mostly out of curiosity, and partly to help me in creating a brand new resource for Mommasterminds members.

I asked, “What contact method do you prefer to use when contacting customer service?” 

photo credit:
Jacob Bøtter

Personally, I like non-contact methods. So if given the choice, I’ll almost always choose an FAQ, then a forum, then a help desk, then live chat, email and finally the phone. In that order.

It’s not that I don’t like to talk to people. Over the years I’ve gotten much better at that. But customer service on the phone - ugh, you know how that goes. If it’s not voice mail, you get an re-routed and very often take up way too much of my time. Besides, it’s kinda hard to talk with kids screaming in the background.

With the other methods, I can at least help myself or get help,

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Every now and then someone will ask me “How do I manage so many email address for so many different sites?” Building a good email flow sounds terribly complicated. I admit, it did to me too and for a long time I procrastinated on it.

Over the past 12 months, I spent considerable amount of time devising a smooth, workable infrastructure for the company’s customer support email flow. Best thing I ever did. Some parts still need sanding down - that is inevitable. Even the best systems have some rough patches. Overall this has worked out nicely.

Like many Internet Marketers, we have several websites. We started off with each one having its own email address with its own POP3 account. As you can imagine that quickly got out of hand.

So we started re-directing everything into one or two email address but it was still problematic because we’d mess up on the reply emails and overall it was

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