How startups can provide better customer service!

Every market today is competitive and saturated as well. But what separates a successful business from a failing one, it is the experience you provide your customers. Great customer experiences are what set companies apart in a crowded market because they produce passionate and expressive customers. This competitive leverage is hard for external companies to breakthrough because of the existing business-consumer relationship.

Establishing strong customer service isn’t easier for start-ups than it is for larger companies. Contrarily, start-ups have to provide a significant level of customer service right off the bat because they’re often selling game-changing innovative products. Crafting a great customer experience requires you to purposefully invest resources in customer service. Initially, that requires your time as a founder; unless your startup is well-funded, you probably don’t have the budget to hire a dedicated customer service team. So here are a few steps you can follow to provide better customer service:

1. Define your customer service metrics: Measure the quality of your customer service and spot the areas for improvement. You can use several types of metrics, but start-ups should opt for experience-driven customer service metrics. Essentially, you want to identify and look for the metrics that speak to the overall customer experience, to understand how customer relations are progressing after the sale.
2. Be open across all customer-communication channels: An omnichannel customer service strategy is now the norm across almost all industries. Meaning, you should be able to support customers via email, text messages, social media, and phone calls. To confirm that your customers are getting help as quickly as possible, pick the channels they will most likely use. For instance, if your customers belong to the millennial generation, they’ll prefer a live chat or social media over traditional channels, like email and phone. However, if your product/service is sophisticated and expensive, a phone call should be among the priority support channels.
3. Learn from your customers’ feedback: As a startup, you want to get as much customer feedback as possible. Getting customer feedback after every interaction is crucial for the startup’s customer service quality and overall success. Feedback not only shows what the customer service agents are good at but also where improvements need to be made. Devise customer feedback tools to learn about your customer satisfaction index.
4. Build a powerful knowledge base: We live in the age of the internet, thus, most of the customers seeking support will look online first. Therefore, creating a customer portal or a knowledge base with comprehensive articles, guides, how-to manuals, and FAQ sections allows for immediate customer support. Pay attention to the questions customers ask and answer them thoroughly and easily in your knowledge base. Make it as intuitive and easy to navigate as possible.

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