The key to providing excellent customer service is to make yourself available to your customers. In these days of 24-hour lifestyles, you'll need to be available through a variety of methods if you want to compete. This may mean taking on staff or independent contractors to get the job done.

At the very least, you'll want to of course be available via e-mail. But these days, customers expect more. If customers find that a company isn't available, they may move on to your competitor, and obviously, you don't want that. Here are some basic methods that you'll want to make yourself available by:

Instant message
Live chat
Support tickets
Phone

Providing support may prove expensive on the staffing end, but numbers can be had quite inexpensively. If you're based in the United States, companies such as RingCentral and eVoice can provide 1-800 numbers for a reasonable price. In the UK, 0800 numbers are as well cheap. In fact, you can purchase 0800 number service directly from us, and you can have the number forwarded to your local number in the UK, or elsewhere in the world, depending upon your needs.

Live chat software is plentiful. You can install free solutions such as LiveZilla, or you can pay for hosted live support from companies such as ProvideSupport, which offers support for as little as around 10 pounds per month.

It all comes down to budget, but if you make live chat available to your customers, you'll provide another method for them to reach you, which will come in valuable for clients if they have support or billing issues.

Then, of course, there's the trouble ticket system, which is integrated into WHMCS, and which is available in a variety of programs, both free and paid. Although programs such as WHMCS must be paid for (monthly or one-off), you'll likely find that the functionality is far greater than that of free programs.

By making yourself or your company available by more than one method, you'll increase customer satisfaction, and you'll likely find that more customers will approach you with sales questions. After all, answering a live chat request is by far less expensive than handling a phone call, once you factor in operating costs, and wages or payments to staff or contractors.

Consider this: a possible customer wants to discuss with someone about a hosting plan before purchasing it. If your company is available to them, you may get the sale. If they see "offline", or see that you don't have live chat available, they may go on to the next guy, and of course, you don't want that.