In today’s world every company has a customer support unit to provide help and support regarding their services and troubleshooting .Most of them provide online customer support apart from the dial up facility to help its customers. This service provides an interface between company and its customers and helps increase customer satisfaction and builds confidence in the company.

Online customer support can be provided in many different ways. You can send an email, chat with your id, or do live chat with the customer support representative for answering the queries. You can also avail the internet telephony option to contact the customer support. Since most of the time there is delay in replying to mails, live chat is gaining a lot of popularity as this way our queries can be addressed promptly. Many companies provide live chat software which provides the feedback facility, increase efficiency as operator can interact with more than one consumer at a time, help gather information about website traffic, check number of chats handled by each operator and maintain history of the visitor.

Many companies also have an online self help database which has information, FAQs, manuals, documents with search facility for a quick look-up to find the relevant information. There is also remote desktop option where the support personal can access your desktop remotely for troubleshooting. This option is mostly used if the support is related to computers. The consumer does not have to carry the computer to shop or wait for someone to come to fix the problem. This process helps to save lots of time and money.

There are many official or unofficial blogging sites and forums where user interact with each other and discuss their issues and provide solutions with their own experiences. Companies use their official sites to update user with the most general issues that have come up with their products and how to troubleshoot them.

There are many companies who outsource the customer support work .This may be due to the cost factor as the outsourced company may be cheaper or may be the customer support work needs special skills which the outsourced company may possess .Outsourcing also helps some of these companies to concentrate more on their core work and increase productivity. Since online customer support may also encounter high volumes outsourcing the work to a company which specializes in the field of online support helps in building better bond with the customers.