How to treat your clients AFTER they've bought your software

Creating and maintaining good customer relations in a software business can be incredibly difficult. This is due to any number of factors, from development work often being done in a different country to the client, to unruly developers, to ineffective lines of communication between the client and the developer.

Obvious reasons aside, satisfied customers are the best sales people of your product. Word of mouth sales is probably a software development companies most effective tool. A developer or company can never afford to forget that no matter how good a product is, without effective, efficient customer support afterwards, it is dead in the water.

The single most important thing to remember is that your customer is never as well versed in the dark arts of software development as you are, no matter how often they try and insist otherwise. If they were, they wouldn't be calling you.

Below is a list of the most effective and commonly used tools and techniques for customer support.

1) Include a help program.

This is the simplest and most convenient way of addressing your customers problems. By writing a comprehensive how to list for every detail function of your software, you can eliminate their need to call you,saving you time and heartache. By taking the time to do this, you can also save a great deal of time and money in the long run.

2) Use your website

Your website can be so much more than an online brochure,by including how to tutorials and help modules, you can offer support to your clients without actually engaging them on a personal level. Another benefit of this is that it will probably help traffic to your site a lot more effectively, which is never a bad thing.

3) Make the clients phone or email experience pleasant

Everynow and then, the client just needs to contact you over the phone, and while phone support can be both unpleasant and boring, it very often is the thing that makes or breaks a clients perception of your business.
Try changing the music that plays when they're holding, i'm yet to encounter a client that was in a bad mood after listening to a bit of Barry White for thirty seconds, it disarms people and makes your life easier.

Another thing to consider is the length of time the client should wait, never, ever exceed 3 minutes. Ever.

Ultimately how you treat your clients is how they'll treat you and your software development company.