You have a great product. What you haven’t hacked (yet) is providing your customers with support and service that makes them loyal ambassadors of your product and standby word-of-mouth marketers—driving growth and establishing a positive reputation. You probably, like many, didn’t give it a second thought at the start.
Good thing you’re here now.
If by chance, you’re still on the sidelines about the importance of Customer service to your startup, you should check out how it can help you supercharge customer acquisition and retention.
Let’s get into how to ensure the best service for your customers and guarantee satisfaction but first:
Why is Customer Service Important For Startups?
It’s simple. It is the differentiator between successful startups and those that struggle to gain traction. Scratch that, bad customer service can crumble an entire industry. A whopping 80% of your customers will leave you for your competitor if they face more than one bad experience with your product, we didn’t come up with the statistics, it’s fact.
Customer Service is the mediator between your product and a sizeable chunk of customer satisfaction. Customers don’t just up and leave when they have a bad experience. As long as they bought into it (or bought it), they will air their grievance if they have to.
That is their attempt to find a solution and your chance to turn that grievance around to achieve a happy and retained customer. Customers who will spread the word about your product. Ripple effect.
But let’s put it in bullet points, shall we?
- Customer Retention: keeping your customers happy irrespective of their experience with your product or service more than doubles their love for the brand. Sure, call marketing king, but Customer support is also sitting pretty on the royal table. A happy customer is a loyal one and a loyal customer is one number taken off your churn list. Even better, a loyal and happy customer is both a recurring revenue source and an avenue for potential customers.
- Competitive Edge: You’re immediately different from your competitors. It’s an innovative age and it is not ending anytime soon. This means there’ll always be a new startup around the block doing the same thing you are with probably even better features. What sets you apart is your dedication to your customer base and how you execute exceptional customer service.
- Product Growth: The base idea for your product, (which by the way, you should ensure has product-market fit) is out already and in the hands of users. In line with that, product features and updates should be approached from the angle of what will be useful to your customers. The only way to know that is by listening to them. What are they advocating for as possible solutions to problems? Yes, your customers will tell you to do XYZ so they can have a better experience with your product. It’s a customer thing. Don’t fret it. Customer Service helps you tilt towards a product growth that is more customer-centric.
- Word-Of-Mouth Marketing: Positive customer service is a catalyst for unofficial brand ambassadorship. Not to mention the free positive reviews it generates which will be useful marketing materials for your startup. There’s no downsides to it when done right. None.
Build a Customer-Centric Culture
Excellent customer service doesn’t start from hiring customer support personnel and placing the person at the helm of the phone or social media affairs answering complaints. It starts from structurally hiring the right people who understand that at the core of a successful startup are the customers.
To build a culture like this, you need to:
- Hire The Right Team: Recruiting professionals who place customers first is the first step. This isn’t limited to just product managers, marketers or the Customer Success unit. Hire developers or programmers who think about the product’s users first, product designers who prioritize user experience and not just aesthetics. This way, everyone embodies the same values and won’t have a problem taking on customer tickets to solve issues specific to their departments.
- Set Clear Company Values: Every startup wants to be known for something. The best ones are known for customer empathy and clear communication. Make it a standard where everyone is aware of the company’s unrelenting dedication to customers.
- Utilize Customer Relationship Management: CRM governs every interaction between your business and customers. From queries to the resolution, and solution point. A good CRM plan gives your customer support team ample information about your customers so they can solve problems uniquely and improve customer relationships.
- Train and Empower Your Customer Support Team: Including communication and conflict resolution workshops either quarterly or annually would do a lot of good. If you’re a bootstrapped startup, then you can make it mandatory for the CS team to take free courses on these areas as a unit and place a supervisor to oversee the progress. Theoretical knowledge will hold little weight when it comes to real-life situations of handling customer complaints, queries, and requests.
- Implement A Proper Documentation System: This will help you sort and keep track of queries, complaints, enquiries, and requests. Documentation also helps you cut short the resolution time. Instead of spending time handling similar complaints afresh, you can easily replicate solutions that were successfully implemented, go straight to the right channel of resolution, and avoid errors.
- Encourage Feedback System: open channels for your customers to be able to reach you, give feedback on the quality of your product and share suggestions they think would be beneficial. This way, you reduce the rate of customer queries and increase customer satisfaction and retention.
- Keep Your Team Happy: A disgruntled staff equals unsatisfied customers. Yes, team bonding activities matter, and if possible incorporate therapeutic and mental wellness initiatives for your customer success teams. Taking on complaints all day long is certainly not a jolly ride but with the right incentives and support, you’ll have your CS team ready to do what they do best.
Customer Service Channels For Startups and Their Response Rate
If you’re going to do this, you might as well do it right. As a startup, you can start with one channel. However, as you grow, you have to offer multiple channels to accommodate your customers and give avenues for different touchpoints. Each channel has a standard response rate, the one thing that binds them all is that across all, your customers expect quality response.
- Phone calls: You can provide a dedicated phone number for urgent issues. This is mostly crucial for businesses but can be utilized in the startup culture, especially for fintech startups (we’ve heard it’s the ghetto over there). The response rate for this channel is immediate and as such there has to be a dedicated CS representative handling this.
- Email support: A standard email for support is usually the go-to. Emails such as XYZ@support.com or XYZ@help.com indicate that the email address is mainly for customer aid. The response time frame for this channel is typically within 24 hours
- Live Chat: This channel offers real-time support through live chat software. Zendesk, Hubspot, LiveAgent, and LiveChat are examples of software you can use to respond to customers in real time. The response rate for this channel is automated and immediate as you can implement AI and have a human CS representative take over at set customer query scenarios.
- Social Media: Customer queries and inquiries come very often through social media. It is advisable to maintain a policy of escalation where issues are taken to the appropriate quarters for resolution. You might also find it beneficial to give your customer representative access to your social media channels to handle customer concerns. The response rate for this channel varies between immediate, 60 minutes, and within 24 hours.
Strategies For Delivering Exceptional Customer Service
- Personalization: Address customers by name and tailor their solutions to their needs and habits (as you’ll learn through CRM).
- Quality response: Sometimes the fastest response is not the best response. The end goal is to give a solution that works and keeps the customer happy while at it.
- Timely response: Responding promptly has its own place and channels. Most times, channels with immediate response time frames are for you to show the customer that you’re with them and have hands on deck to solve the issue.
- Proactive Support: Anticipate potential issues by reaching out to customers and doing a check-in.
- Empathy: show your users that you understand their concerns, use empathy-induced language and maintain a levelled and helpful tone of voice across all customer service channels
Track and Measure Your Customer Service Performance
Your customer service efforts are measurable. Take time to track key metrics to evaluate your support performance. It helps you know where to pick up the slack, double down on and improve. These are the metrics you should be concerned about if you want to provide the best customer service for your startup
- Net Promoter Score (NPS): It helps you measure customer loyalty.
- First Response Time: This measures the time frame for a first-time response to a customer query across all channels.
- Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): This metric measures customer satisfaction through feedback forms and surveys.
- Total Resolution Rate: This metric covers whether a complaint or query has been resolved so you can close the ticket/loop.
- Customer Ticket Volume: This lets you know the quantity of tickets gotten per time. Too many tickets within a time frame is a red flag indicating a problem with the product.
- Customer Churn: This helps you keep track of customers who are likely to churn.
As you read at the beginning, your product is probably the best thing but without excellent service and a customer-centric approach, your startup might not survive long enough to be remarkable. You don’t want that. No one does.