How do you deal with it? Are you one of many who think that it is a good thing to give up on marketing? I hope not. One of the most terrible ways to fight downtime is to reduce marketing activities, IT investments, and cut on customer support and quality of customer service. Why?

1. Because your customers expectation have not changed

The finances are tight but people still value good service. Even tough we are more likely to be extra careful with buying decisions, our expectations about service we should get have not change. Not for a dime.

Did you became more patient ? No, of course. Do you have more nerves to deal with low quality support? No, of course. Under the stress, we are more likely to become opposite; more demanding and unwilling to bear with bad products/services support we paid for.

2. Because almost everybody else does

The most small and middle-sized companies are doing just as described. They cut expenses by decreasing marketing activities and providing lower quality support. Of course, they have no starting attention to decrease quality of support services, but when you lay off a couple of support people, get mission impossible task in front of support personnel left, cut a couple of lines.. Occasionally it will decline.

Now it is time to take advantage of the situation and win customer through an outstanding, fast support. When the economic rises again, you will have a better market share.

3. Customer Experience Does Impact Your Business

According to 3rd annual report on Customer Experience Impact released by RightNow Technologies and Harris Interactive last October, customers care deeply about the experience they have with your company.

- 87% have stopped doing business with a company that provided a bad experience

- 84% will spread a word about their bad experience

4. Help Desk Software is a Saving Solution

Besides keeping focus on your current customers by providing faster and reliable support, help desk software can save you a lot of money. Let’s look at one simple, typical cost-benefit analysis in terms of reducing time per call (only one of the help desk benefits!)

For example, suppose that an organization has 200 users. Assume that all employees costs $30 per hour and a year has 200 working days. If a help desk software incident management feature reduces user down time only 1 minute per day per user, we got

200 users x 200 days x $30/hr x 1/60 min = $ 20.000/annually

Where and how can you save $20.000 annually for just one minute?

So, why companies are investing in help desk software now? To cut costs in a manner that will now negatively affect efficiency and productivity and to retain customers.

No matter how hard it is, we can’t afford to lose customers now. We should make the recession work for us.
Investing in an IT tool as automated customer support solution may sound unreal but opportunity costs are far greater. At least you can give it a try because help desk software can make a difference.

Especially in a slow economy.  To help you out, Polar software gives you a fully featured web-based Polar Help Desk software, free of charge for commercial use, and full customer support.

Ps. One great article on fighting recession time and attracting new customers in a bad economy you can read here.

Also, don’t miss Seth Godin’s and Robert Kiyosaki’s tips about great benefits for startups those days. If it is good for startups, it may serve to older companies as well.