Kayako Support System – How $29.95 Changed My Life

Every day I get emails from people asking for help and advice to start their own Internet business.

Although I feel akward giving advice when I’m still busy achieving my goals, I try to respond as much as possible. However, there’s one thing I realized with all those emails – most of them have the wrong mentality about Internet marketing.

Internet marketing is all about automation and leverage.

In this post, I want to talk about automation only. I’ll tell you a story of how $29.95 changed my life.

The story starts with the launch of the now household brand, Chapter-M. That was the first successful ebook I have ever sold. Part of that success meant that I was getting more attention, forum threads started to discuss about me and the amount of emails I get on a day-to-day basis skyrocketed.

There was only one problem: I still only had 24 hours a day.
As much as I tried to respond to all the emails, it was just too much for me to handle. Replying to everyone meant that I would not have the time to focus on new projects that will bring my business to the next level.

When people started to complain about my slow response to their emails, I figured something had to be done.

I knew that the best way to overcome the issue was to create my own ticket-based support system, and eventually get a few other people to help me with the emails and enquiries. The question was – where do I start?

I knew nothing about ticket-based system, so my first venture was to try a couple of free ones such as Help Center Live, OS Ticket, and PHP Support Tickets.

It didn’t take me long to realize that these free systems (available in any Cpanel-based hosting) didn’t have the features I wanted, and the learning curve was something I didn’t want to get into.

So I finally decided to go with the best system available, Kayako. Kayako (www.kayako.com) has several hosted and non-hosted licences available. The system is so advanced you can even choose to get notification of new tickets via your mobile phone, and you can even add Live Support as well as integrate phone calls as past of your support desk.

All I really needed was the eSupport Suite, and since I didn’t want to get into the tech stuff of hosting it on my own server, I let them host it for me.

The entire system was set-up withint minutes and all I had to do was to login, create a few staff accounts, and get familiar with the rest of the system. Here’s a screenshot of how my support system looks:

With Kayako, I can set my own Knowledgebase which serves like a FAQ page. The probem with FAQ pages is that no one really has a look at them. People get lazy and since you’re there anyway, they prefer to just send you a ticket and let YOU direct them to the correct FAQ page.

With Kayako, however, the AJAX-based interface will display the answers to FAQ while the person is typing the support request. This has worked like magic for me, as people get their answers even before they finish typing the subject header.

You can also set a lot of Predefined Replies for information that you can’t display publicly such as payment / billing info, download page URLs, etc. If you can’t answer all the support email by yourself, you can also choose to add a new Staff, and assign the staff to Departments such as billing, tech support, and sales enquiries.

In effect you can have as many staff as you want, each assigned to a different department and managed by you, the administrator. With this fuction, you can easily outsource your entire support system if you want, and you can still manage all responses, pay staff by hours worked, get full ticket reposrts, set support standards and delivery times, and much, much more.

Now to the moral of the story, i.e WHY am I telling you all this?

No, I’m not trying to sell you the Kayako system.

I’m just trying to remind you of the ultimate equation of the universe:

TIME = MONEY

See most people wouldn’t pay $29.95 because they think it’s a waste of money. Then they spend hours a day sorting, tracking and replying emails. Precious hours that are definately worth more than $29.95.

Like I said, it’s just a question of having the right mentality.

People email me asking “Gobala, how do I create my own opt-in email database?”

I say: “Get Aweber or Marketer’s Choice. Copy the opt-in form onto your website, and market that page everywhere you can.”

Then they say: “What… I have to pay? Is there something available for free, or can I do it myself?”

And I say: “Of course there is, if you are worth less than $XX an hour.”

If you understand that TIME = MONEY, don’t waste your time trying to hunt for free stuff and trying to make it work.

If YOUR daily equation looks like this:

TIME (24 hours) = MONEY ($200)

… then wouldn’t it make more sense to try to make more money with the amount of time you have?

What if spending $20 – $60 a month can free up 5 hours a day for you? Can’t you figure out how to turn that extra 5 hours into cash?

Because you see, unlike money, which is theoretically “unlimited”, TIME is a scarce resource. You can trade TIME for MONEY, or you can trade MONEY for TIME.

But understand that there’s only 24 hours worth of TIME in a day, and the clock never stops ticking…

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