Ten Tips for Startup Customer Service and a Great Customer Experience

As a new startup, you probably have a lot on your plate to deal with – from getting the finances you need to developing and delivering your product to marketing and sales. And while all these are important, you still also have to think about customer support as you start taking on new customers. As a newly established business, you need to ensure that your customer service is set up in a way that reflects your company’s culture and brand while delivering a unique customer experience. To help ensure that you deliver the best customer service experience, here are 10 tips for you to consider:

1. Ensure everybody on your team recognizes the importance of quality customer support and experience.

While your customer service team might be new, it’s essential to ensure that everyone understands their role in ensuring that your business delivers a great customer experience; after all, they are the visible face of your business’ support capability.

2. Decide on whether or not you’ll make deliberate customer experience plays.

If you truly understand and value the importance of customer support/service and delivering five-star customer experiences, then capitalize on it by making it part of your startup’s DNA and market on it.

3. Make sure your customer service setup reflects your business culture and brand.

Take time to determine how you want your customer service setup and how it will operate, especially when it comes to customer perceptions. For instance, let’s say you’d like to give off the impression that you are “professional” but not “big-conglomerate professional.” To accomplish this, you need to understand, craft, and deliver a message that’s unique to your startup for your customer service department to use when helping out customers. 

4. Distinguish that is not just about the right processes, people, or technology.

Getting your startup’s customer service setup right and delivering world-class customer experiences is all about creating the perfect combination of the three. If you want your startup to move quickly, then make sure you also factor in the speed of incorporating new help desk technology into the business.

5. Be careful when choosing customer support channels.

Ideally, you shouldn’t limit the customer service access and communication channels you have made available to customers. These include options such as chat, self-service/self-help, email, telephone, and newer options like chatbots. Seek advice from this IT support company Glasgow. Also, make sure you pay close attention to and continue to invest in those channels and customer experience strategies that your target customers favor. The right customer experience strategy is one that adapts with time.

6. Keep in mind that customer support/service can also serve as a good feedback mechanism.

As someone who’s just started a business, you need to make sure you get all the feedback you can from your customers to understand how well your startup is progressing. If set up right, your customer support setup could help facilitate this. 

7. Do not scrimp on customer support setup costs.

Yes, budgets for new startups can be tight, but if you’d like to deliver a five-star customer experience, then you will have to employ suitably experienced and skilled customer support personnel and invest in a professional help desk tool that augments and enhances their support capabilities.

8. Set customer experience and service targets and make sure you meet them.

Claiming that you’d like your startup to deliver a great customer support experience is one thing and consistently doing it is another. Reaching your targets is something that not only calls for you to invest in the right technology, people, and processes but also in mechanisms that help monitor, report, and improve your customer support and experience. Apart from all that, there is also the question of where you’ll set these targets. Since it is all about managing your customers’ expectations, make sure you quickly understand what is expected of you. 

9. Strategize for future scale.

While it is important that you do not delay the introduction of customer support capabilities and that you do not overspend as a new startup, it is also vital that you avoid investments that will get ‘thrown away’ as you grow. As such, while your startup’s customer support setup might start small, make sure it is something that you can scale as your startup grows.

10. Take the 80/20 approach.

This approach, aka “the Pareto Principle”, asserts that: “For most events, about 80 percent of the effects originate from 20 percent of the causes.” When it comes to startup customer support, the principle can be applied by understanding which 80 percent of your support value comes from 20 percent of your activities and investments. The vital thing here is to understand what makes the most difference to your customer support experience in your target customers’ eyes.