Create an online workspace just for your customers

Keeping in touch with your customers is critical to keeping them as your customers. So you want to be available to them by e-mail and phone, and sometimes even invite them out to lunch.

However, if you're a small business owner with a growing business, providing customers with a sufficient level of attention can get tricky. One way to show you care about them—and perhaps offset some of the demand they place on your time—is by creating an online customer sharing space, or "workspace."

Providing your customer with a workspace is like inviting your customer to drop by your office to get information from you—anytime they want. A workspace is a simple, self-service Web site where you can share news and announcements, product information, important dates, and answer questions your customers might have.

For instance, say that you operate a plumbing supply center. Local plumbers who have permission to sign in to your workspace might check it to see if back-ordered parts have come in, if you're open on Saturday mornings, or even find and print literature on a popular fixture that their customers want to know about.

Customer workspaces are a feature of Microsoft Office Live Small Business. You need to do two things to make them work. First, you need to create the workspace and add to it the information you want to share. Then you need to enable customers to visit the workspace site with a password-protected sign-on.

Creating your customer workspace

Office Live Small Business makes it easy to build out your customer workspace by providing built-in Web page components for presenting announcements, calendars, links, documents, pictures and other types of content that you want to share. These components—called "Web parts"—can be added and deleted from your workspace, and customized to work just the way you want. You decide what information is displayed on the page and don't need to know how to code or use HTML to make it happen.

In addition, you can create a "dashboard" page so that your visitors can easily view all the types of information available on you site and to quickly access what they want.

Here are some of the components you can add to a customer workspace:

• Document Library:   A place where visitors can view documents and other files you want them to see.
• Picture Library:   A place where you can store pictures and display them as thumbnails or in a slide show, and make them available to download.
• Announcements:   A place to list news items and other short bits of information you want to share with customers.
• Discussion Board:   A place where customers can comment and carry on newsgroup-style discussions.
• Links:   A place where you can create links to other helpful Web pages your customers may want to visit.
• Calendar:   A place to show upcoming events.
• Survey:   A place to pose questions and poll your customers.

Because you can instantly edit information in a workspace and display the time of the change, your customers can come to rely on the workspace as a source of up-to-date information.

Giving customers permission to view the workspace

A key feature of an Office Live Small Business workspace is that you can control who can visit the workspace site. You may want only certain customers to access the information there—and probably don't want your competitors poking around it at all.

Office Live Small Business makes the process of granting permission to access the workspace easy with a simple wizard. When creating permission for a customer to view the workspace, you also determine what they can do in the workspace by assigning a role. Depending on the role you assign, a customer might be able to only read information posted in the workspace, or read and edit information, or read, edit, and make alterations to the site itself.

Once you're done assigning a role, Office Live Small Business further automates the process by sending out an e-mail message to the customer that explains what they need to do to gain access to the workspace.

To read a detailed description of how the process and wizard works, see "Using workspaces."

Few things beat personal, one-on-one talks with a customer. But a customer workspace is a great way to streamline some types of customer communications. By putting your information on the Web, you can eliminate unnecessary meetings and phone tag with customers and conveniently make information available outside of regular business hours. That type of consideration can also help build customer loyalty.