You may find this surprising, but Dave and I don't have a dedicated phone support for our respective businesses.

Well, we used to.

Dave's first ecommerce business had it for five days a week. I used to have 24/7 customer support via telephone for treadmill.com. We also had it for a while here on Terran until late last year. After the person who did this for us sent in his notice, we finally decided to remove it permanently in the last week of December 2017.

So, why did we turn the phone off? Mostly because it was just too much effort for very little money. In Terran's case, we found that we were actually losing money. Dave sold his first ecommerce business in 2016. When he started another one, he consciously made the decision to do away with phone support altogether.

Is phone support useless?

That depends. There are businesses that benefit, even need, phone support to obtain leads that will convert into sales. However, for a transactional volume business like ours, it's hard to justify in that vacuum.

Why we love email support

Turning off the phone allowed us to focus on other customer support methods. We think email is the best of the lot. It's easy to outsource (i.e. our team in the Philippines answers customer emails, along with other tasks) so that brings the cost down. Unlike a ringing phone, it's easier to resist the lure of the inbox.

Customer support alternatives

In addition to email, EcomCrew utilizes a few other channels to help out both students and non-students. We answer questions via Messenger and on the EcomCrew Premium Facebook group. We also host three webinars each month where participants can interact with us and ask questions. You can register for the next one using the link below.

Importing From China: Everything You Need to Know

EcomCrew Premium registration is open for a week! Be one of the first to have access to our new Facebook Messenger course.

Sign up here and get insights on how you can grow your business.

As always, thanks for listening to this episode! If you enjoyed listening and think this episode has been useful to you, please take a moment to leave us a review on iTunes.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them below. Happy selling!