One thing I know about these fast times we live in – people want information and engagement when they want and how them want it. The best way to turn this to your advantage is to employ tools that make it as easy as possible for prospects and customers to contact, engage, discuss, provide feedback, get help, collaborate and otherwise talk to you, while still having a life.

Job 1 is to make certain that you have your basic contact information, including maps and directions, right there on every page. Secure contact forms are a great way to make sure messages get through and I’ve also added EmailCenterPro email management software to make sure those emails get answered by the right person in the right way.

Instant Message – providing IM and chat room widgets allow visitors to get an answers and chat with other visitors
Meebo
Bold Chat

Click to Talk and Live Chat – These tools make it very easy for you to monitor a visitors activity and answer questions before they even get asked
LivePerson
Click2Talk

Ratings and Reviews – These scripts can be added to web pages to allow visitors or customer to rate and review products and content making them more useful to future visitors.
JS Kit
PHP Scripts

Testimonials – This tool automates the process of collecting audio testimonials from customers to post on your website.
Audio Acrobat

Feedback – Getting consistent feedback from customers, vendors, partners, and staff is a great way to discover new ways to serve your customers and how to do things better.
Rypple
Survey Gizmo

FAQ Manager – Let your sales team, marketing department and customers collaborate on the creation of real-time FAQs
Knowledge Manager

Help Desk – provide answers solutions to customer support questions
Zen Desk

Forums– By providing your prospects and customers with a place to ask each other questions, you may find your customers selling and providing customer service type responses on your behalf.
Vanilla
Userplane –

Instant Demo – Using web conferencing tools you can show a prospect a sales presentation at the drop of a hat
Glance
GoToMeeting

Mobilize Site – while this one is a bit off topic, it’s important that you address the needs of folks visiting and interacting with your sites on mobile devices
MoFuse
Winksite

The above list just scratches the surface in terms of available tools, but hopefully this gets you thinking about ways to make it easier for your prospects and customers to get the information they are looking for.

What other tools have you discovered useful for this?

Image credit: law kevin

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