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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I love Gmail. So much that I moved my primary email to GoogleApps - which has other benefits other than email but that’s another blog post.

I love the way archives, labels and starring works. It fits in nicely with my own GTD system. I can get things done with it.

In the The 4-Hour Workweek,
Tim Ferris says to quit using web based email and use a desktop client instead or rather, a system where you have to actively click a “retrieve email” button to get your new mail. Reason, because email clients that deliver your email instantly (Web based mail and IMAP) distract you.

You could be working on replying or sending an email out when something new comes in. You feel compelled to click on it. If you are forced to click on a button, you don’t ‘know’ new mail is there and you will get what you need done, get out of there and

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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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In the last two weeks, I was reminded of something that is oh so very easy to overlook. Check your website disk space. Here’s what happened.

First, a client asked for help because the script we developed for her quit working. This is our normal reaction - me included. When a script fails. Something is wrong with the script! But after some quick research, it seems the script quit working because the web hosting account is full.

This is not true of all scripts. But if you have a system that adds data to your database on a regular basis e.g. blog posts, blog comments etc, you’ll fill up your database faster than you think. Especially when you get hit with some major traffic and people start commenting like crazy. Now admittedly it does take a lot of data to fill up even a smallish hosting plan. Depends on what is added to the database

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