Allowing your current and potential customers to contact you is essential to providing customer service. Making that contact easy for them can be confusing for you because there are many ways to provide support.

Some of those ways include: Telephone – direct or toll free, online contact form, instant messaging, online help desk, site monitoring software like Crafty Syntax and of course, direct email. I provide most of those, but was hesitant to add Skype^™ into the mix because I thought it would just add to the confusion and possible cost of operating. After seeing the possibilities of Skype^™, I finally set up an account.

Now current and potential customers, family members and friends can contact me either by instant messaging, Skype^™ phone and video phone if they have a web cam. Skype^™ users can contact each other free of charge. You only get charged for calling to and from a land line or cell phone.

This addition to the contact methods is quick for those who want to speak with a real person without incurring the cost of calling, whether from within the USA or anywhere in the world that Skype^™ is available. It is like having a toll free call center separate from our regular phone.

Since I use a headset on all my phones including the cell phone, I thought this would be confusing to have another headset hanging in front of me. That turned out not to be a problem since the land line is on one side of the desk and Skype^™ headset on the other. It is a USB headset that plugs into the computer. Setting is up was easy too. I just plugged it in, installed Skype, created my account and clicked the Skype^™ Test Call icon to test the connection. It recorded my voice and played it back to make sure all was working.

Once that was done, I added link on the navigation menu on some of my websites, starting with Short Sale Holdings so others can call me or my JV Partner, depending on which service they are inquiring about. With that in place, customer service can be taken to another level and have more communications wrapped into one program.

Have you tried Skype^™ yet? What do you use it for and what do you think of it? Your comments are welcome.

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