customer-development, customer-serviceHow do you get international customers and prospects to call you and talk with you? Do you need a toll free number like evoice or grasshopper?
Or does a skype number more suitable?
I am currently using skype to go number to dial skype, and then dial the international number.
For incoming, I’m giving customers my mobile number but not sure if wind mobile charges for international incoming calls.
I imagine this is to deliver support and the occasional sales questions, so answering the question from that angle.
Speaking for myself from back when I was running a product-oriented business, combining good usability, on-screen docs, a forum, Skype chat + calls, and Skype-in/Skype-out worked pretty well.
The clients helped each other out when the on-screen docs weren’t enough. Don’t discount UI, readily available docs and a forum, as this combination really helps you scale – in my case from zero to 2k clients single-handedly in spite of a support intensive application.
I’d chime in when needed in the forum, of course. And later, I recruited active forum members to help out more actively than I could reasonably expect them to for free.
In pathological cases, we’d escalate to Skype chat or Skype calls, and Skype-in/Skype-out was a good fallback when neither worked for them.
My main gripe with doing everything on Skype was that it wasn’t group-oriented (there might be options now.) This is fine as long as you’re alone answering the calls or when you want to keep in touch with a few key clients. It kind of fell apart when I wanted staff to handle this for me, since old time users would already be in my contacts and not bother with the forum if I was around. As such, tip: be wary of that and be forward looking in this sense.
My mobile phone was on my site all along. Here’s another tip if you go that route: be very wary and make your time zone very explicit. Not doing so essentially guarantees that you’ll get 3am phone calls with some level of regularity. Because, well, some colorful and deliciously friendly US citizens cannot imagine that it might be the middle of the night on the other side of the pond.
Prior to Skype-in/Skype-out, I had briefly looked into getting a carrier to set up an actual phone number. It’s not on your radar, but I’ll mention it nonetheless as bad (it’s expensive) for reference.
With all that said, this was a half dozen years ago.
New VoIP services (such as Grasshopper) have appeared since and, quite frankly, look rather fantastic. Were I to do the above all over, I’d probably go with that – alongside a forum or some kind of social support software (e.g. GetSatisfaction), Skype, and possibly some live chat software that can fit on the website (e.g. Olark or Slack or both) for the occasional user who doesn’t use chat apps.
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