If your online business model is centered around selling products or services online, then you are going to have to think about how you are going to handle customer service requests. Good customer service and online technical support can convince customers to stay with an online business, or to keep coming back.  At the same time, bad customer service or online tech support for an online business can cost the business customers and money.

There are a few things to consider or ask yourself before choosing customer service and tech support options for your online business:

1. Do you plan to offer all customer service and / or technical support yourself? Although this may work out initially, as your business grows you could be spending large amounts of time handling customer service issues rather than building your business. If you are spending more than 10% of your working time on customer service it is time to consider hiring somebody or outsourcing. Your time is much better spent on growing your business.

2. What kind of customer service and tech support would you like to make available to customers (email, live chat, phone support, etc.)?  What is the competition offering? Is there an industry support standard for the type of online business that you run? The more accessible you are to your customers, the more trust they will have in your company.

3. Would you like to be able to offer support 24/7, or only during normal business hours? I don't think it is a bad thing to post your customer service hours on your website. In fact, I think that since "regular" businesses have business hours, posting your hours of operation can actually build additional trust.

4. Do you want to provide automated customer service help in some way to cut down on manual requests? Do you plan to provide self-help resources online for common tech support issues or customer service questions? If you see that you are getting the same questions over and over again then you can definitely cut down on your support load by creating a FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page where customers can find answers to their questions.

After answering those questions related to customer service and support for online business, you should have a basic idea of your needs, and can start to explore various customer service and tech support options, including:

1. Live chat software – If you want to offer a live chat support option to customers, you will need investigate various live chat software packages. Live chat software allows your customers to contact you via a chat window on your website. Please remember that someone needs to be in front of their computer to answer these chat requests but in today's world of "instant" access, it is a benefit to have "instant" support on your website with one of these services. If you are comfortable with installing software on your website then there is a free program called Crafty Syntax.

2. Phone systems or additional phone numbers / lines – You may want to have separate phone numbers available for customer service or technical support lines, especially if you expect to receive a lot of calls. There are also services that allow you to give the appearance of a very large company with a very small investment. You can get an 800 number from RingCentral.com and that 800 number can be setup to forward the call to one of several extensions. You can have the message say, "Press 1 for Sales", "Press 2 for Support", etc and then have those extensions either provide a recorded message or forward the call to any phone number you choose.

3. Outsourcing options – If you don’t want to handle technical support and customer service calls or chats alone, but can’t afford to hire full-time or part-time employees for your online business, outsourcing work to independent consultants or firms in other countries may be a viable option. I usually recommend people find stay-at-home moms or college students to provide support services. These people can be hired on a part time basis and usually provide excellent service. Hiring part time customer service reps works well with the Ring Central service mentioned above. You can schedule Ring Central to forward calls to different phone numbers at different times. So you could have a stay-at-home mom taking calls from 8-3 Monday through Thursday and then a college student taking calls from 3-6. You could then setup the system to send you the calls in the off hours or just give the customer a message to call you during your regular business hours.

4. FAQ / help desk systems – If you want to provide on-site tech support or customer support information, so customers don’t have to contact the company for simple, common problems, then either use an FAQ or help desk solution or create a custom support area of your website. This can range from a simple frequently asked questions page, to setting up automated responses from email accounts to tackle basic questions from a dropdown list. A support forum can also be launched, where support representatives can answer questions, and customers can help each other.

No matter what customer service and support options you choose for your online business, always take care of customers and their support needs. While happy customers can be quiet customers, unhappy customers (especially with tech support issues) love to spread negative feedback.