REVIEW: Startups Live ICYMI | Joshua Davidson on Customer Service (Part II)
You might be surprised to learn just how much in-person relationships and caring for existing customers matters to your business. You’ll never take them for granted again after listening in here…
Written by Keith Liles // Also shared on Startups.co.

“The customer is why you exist. Why your company chooses to exist. If you don’t put them on a pedestal, if you don’t remind yourself, your team, your operations why you’re a business, why you’re here, you’re destined for fail.”
–Joshua Davidson, Six Customer Service Principles To Abide By
New, new, new, new…. We tend to grow the most excited over new things and to obsess over them, so it’s no surprise that startups focus tremendous energy on new customers. So much so, that a vey important player in the destiny of companies gets overlooked: existing customers.
Unforgivable as that might be, the good news, according to Dr. Deborah Hecker, is that “respect, empathy, good listening, recognizing that your customer has a different perspective than you and respecting those differences, good communication, ability to put personal goals aside. All of this can be taught.”
And there is perhaps no better guide for learning the importance of customer service and how to scale it along with your company than Joshua Davidson, Founder + CEO of Chop Dawg. Here is the second half of his Startups Liveconversation on customer service.
“It is funny to me,” said Joshua.
“I see sales drop everything to immediately talk to a new lead, but customer support take days to get back to something with an existing customer.
Isn’t that an example of a messed up company culture?”
“This often comes down to enabling CS teams to re-prioritize efforts,” said Ryan Rutan, “rather than taking things in a first come, first serve basis — to be able to make qualitative calls on what is critical and what isn’t. Requires enabling them with the freedom to do that as well as the knowledge to know the difference.”
“It seems customer service is viewed as a secondary thing, to sales, marketing etc.” noted Stephen Moore.
“…true. Businesses value new customers over existing. Yet most fail to realize how much more affordable — and ROI maintaining — existing customers are!”
“Crazy. Repeat business is so key!”
“People think ’10 new customers’ is sexier than ‘100 existing customers’. Screwed up metrics. Same people that celebrate raising a round as if they ‘made it’ as a company, and continue never generating profit and ROI.”
“Does this come from boards of directors etc? Is that what they prefer to see?”
“Investors. Board of directors. Founder egos. Marketing departments. A lot of fingers to point at.”
Ryan added a critical observation related to where and how things go awry: “I think there is a common misconception that if you can simply drive top-line sales — that retention is something that will figure itself out — that the hard part is bringing in a customer. The reality is that retention is the business.”
Another issue that came up is the difficulty of measuring customer retention in comparison to other objectives, such as new sales. Ankit Khanna asked, “What kind of metrics should a start-up customer service team have to ensure that they are doing an excellent job of retaining their customers (apart from the obvious one of customer retention, of course)?”
“So, number one is ROI, amount of times a customer repeats with you. But I also do one step further as a service company. I do what is called one-on-ones with our clients every month. I chat with them to hear how they feel things are going, what we can improve, anything I can help them with, etc. That is something huge, and though not a direct metric as you asked, it has helped all other metrics.”
“As Chop Dawg grows, how have you and your team changed how you handle customer support at a larger scale? Have you had to utilize tools that you weren’t using before?” questioned Devon Milkovich.
“We have a much more defined process for everything we do. The process was developed from years of working with our clients. Process is from wireframing, high fidelities, product flows, programming, quality assurance, after launch, onboarding a new client, maintaining an existing client…”
“One of the things I’ve done,” shared Ryan, “is to track specific and pivotal moments in CS / Customer relations — things like downgrade request outcomes, refund request outcomes, cancellation request outcomes — things with a fairly binary outcome set — these are measurable and impactful.”
“It’s like in baseball,” said Joshua. “How can you grade the defensive performance of a third basemen VS when the third basement is up to bat? One has real identifiable metrics; other is in theory, subjective (even though we know great defense from terrible).”
“I’ve been rereading Moneyball.”
“Repeat sales can be a metric,” pointed out Imran.
“Yes, but what about maintaining an EXISTING sale. How do you know you didn’t lose a customer if you didn’t handle it right; or managed to maintain that customer?”
“Joshua is there anything in your current CS workflow that you would change?”asked Eileen Guan. “What are you looking to improve as you scale?”
“Yes. The longer answer is we are trying to figure out how to scale the unscalable. For example….”
“The clients we get to meet in-person on average are with us for five years longer.”
“How can we make that happen for EVERY client we have around the world? I also ask our clients, every month, what can we do to be even better for them? What can we do to improve? What about us is weak/lacking? How can we exceed expectations beyond what we are currently doing?”
We might intuitively know that individual attention pays dividends, but the extent to which this holds true — the numbers — might awaken people.
“The world needs more people like you,” said Dr. Hecker.
“Wow, so interesting to hear that in-person clients stick with you so much longer!” exclaimed Eileen. “Do you have any ideas on that front?”
“Easy! Even with web cam, phone calls, text messages, Slack… you will never have the same emotional relationship as with someone you’ve met in person.”
“It is like right now. How many reading this feel like they know me BUT it doesn’t feel the same from the same person they spoke to at a bar one night for ten minutes? Yet I’ve probably shared more with them on here then a drunk guy a bar. But that drunk guy in your mind feels more real. More authentic, because it was a real person, in reality, next to you.”
“All our customer interaction begins face to face,” seconded Stephen. “We think it is a great selling point of ours. Definitely has a positive impact.”
“Exactly. I wish we could do that. We have clients all over the world though, such as Canada, Mexico, Ireland, United Kingdom, France, Thailand, Kuwait, Egypt, New Zealand, Australia, and China.”
“That doesn’t even include the United States!”
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