RightNow Technologies (http://www.rightnowtech.com) has an interesting tool that permits you to create a knowledgebase as you go so that all customer service inquiries and answers get catalogued and can be accessed by customers. This helps sites get over the start-up hurdle of building a knowledgebase.

Customer Support by E-mail
Every new site that comes online thinks they''ll just handle customer inquiries by e-mail, and it won''t be a big deal. They''re wrong. There are so many things wrong with doing customer support by e-mail, that any list is bound to be incomplete. Here''s a partial list of all the problems with support by e-mail:

• Many inquiries take multiple correspondences to be satisfied. Customers will often write asking for information, but not give enough information for reps to answer, so then the reps need to write back asking for more information, which the customers must provide, and so on. Also, friendly e-mail answers often create the perception of a relationship (which is good), but then encourage the customer to continue to ask questions (which is bad). I had the opportunity to answer customer service e-mail for a while for one of my clients, and I was amazed at the inefficiency of e-mail. The reps end up answering the same questions over and over. Even with canned responses, customizing them is time consuming, and a large proportion of customers wrote back with unrelated questions once I''d answered the first question, apparently feeling like they "had me on the line" so they''d ask any questions they had about anything related to any of the products (even use instructions for products we didn''t carry).
• E-mail isn''t real time. Shoppers buy in real time and if you can''t answer the question when they''re on your site, thinking about buying the product, they might not come back or might not remember what they thought they needed the next time they visit. Relying on e-mail for pre-sales support is an enormous opportunity missed.
• Customers expect e-mail answers back right away. Even though you might think of e-mail support as a great activity for slow times, customers are used to corresponding with their friends and family and receiving replies back in minutes. A customer who has no real opinion about your site could easily become disaffected when your idea of a prompt response isn''t prompt enough for him.
• Quality assurance is difficult. Even if you have an e-mail management system that permits auditing of sent messages, most sites find they''re so inundated with e-mail that they don''t have time to use the auditing features, and don''t do any substantive quality assurance. A sales rep on the phone with a bad attitude is easy enough to spot and remove, but how many messages go out from a disgruntled sales or service rep by e-mail before you determine that there''s a problem. Spelling and grammar are important to lots of customers. Will you antagonize them by having under-educated scribners answering e-mail?

Jupiter Communications reported that 42% of Web sites they contacted for customer service assistance did not respond within 5 days. How many sites budgeted for 20% of their Christmas purchases to require customer support? Everyone counted on the traffic and the sales, but did anyone ramp up proportionately for the additional support burden?