IVR, helpdesk, CRM and Customer Service for Dummies

For many small businesses or startups life is all good till it comes to customer service or providing support. When suddenly the volume of calls and emails start going up way more than what a 2-3 person team (usually the business owner or founders) can handle. Suddenly the barrier to increasing scale seems more and more difficult to handle. Thats why a lot of businesses and startups think it is critical have a lot of money upfront or get funding for any idea that is B2C or retail focussed. And till a few years back that was indeed true. All IVR, phone systems and Customer service solutions were targeted towards the big enterprise markets. There were no easy to use yet powerful and scalable solutions for SMBs.

However in the last few years with the onset of cloud based services, there has been an explosion of products and services which basically offer a full fledged enterprise level system with a very low entry cost. I call this the greatest leveler of technology and democratization of resources. No longer does a small company or startup need to spend money on expensive hardware or dedicated phone systems. With cloud based infrastructures, it is very easy to compete with the big boys without having spend a ton of money on hardware costs plus set up and installation fees. This is a series of posts focussing on just that. It is written pretty much for non technical folks who want to setup a basic IVR or phone service to manage calls and then service customers or convert leads via a simple help-desk or CRM solution.

In the process, hopefully we can go through and review a bunch of these competing companies in terms of their ease of use, setup time, technical requirements, startup costs, running costs and value for money or ROI. As it goes with things of this sort, the standard disclaimers do apply here. We'll be trying to keep it real simple for the sake of convenience and may not cover all the features provided by each vendor. Also the reviews or thoughts are obviously based on our own experiences and we may have missed a few things so please do not hold it against us. And finally please do your own research before investing your time and money in any of these products. Now that we have got all of that cleared, please be forewarned we love to say, 'I told you so'.

Here we go:

• How to setup an IVR from scratch - Coming up
• How to setup and manage a 2/3 person callcenter/crm for a startup - Coming up
• How manage customer service for a small company/startup - Coming up
• Quick look at Assistly, Zendesk, Freshdesk etc - Coming up
• Quick look at Twilio, Quickfuse, Twopp etc - Coming up