When starting a business, customer service is often overlooked. The main focus is to develop products and grow the customer base. However, wouldn’t it make sense to ensure that those hard-earned customers are happy and don’t churn? Customer service for start-ups is crucial. We’ll explain why and give 5 practical tips to get going.
Firstly, it’s important to realize that is more expensive to acquire new customers than retaining existing ones. On average even up to 5 times more expensive. Secondly, customers are more critical than ever: PwC found that 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience.
Still many start ups only start investing in customer service late in the game. Often when issues arise. Customers are complaining and it starts impacting product reviews. Once this starts happening, turning the ship around is difficult and takes a lot of time, effort and money.
In this blog, I will share 5 practical tips how to get started with customer service and prepare yourself for future growth – without breaking the bank.
- System: invest in a ticketing system from day 1. While it may seem tempting to start with Outlook or Gmail, you will regret it later. A system allows you to keep better track of customers and issues, and allow you to respond more efficiently. There are a lot of easy to use systems with fairly low license costs. I personally love Zendesk, but also good experiences with others like Intercom, Dixa, Kustomer and Freshdesk. Compare options and select the one which is best for your situation. You can either configure and implement yourself, or find a freelance expert on Upwork to help you.
- Reporting: set goals and create simple to reports to monitor performance and issues. Once you have a system in place, utilize the standard reports or create custom ones if you have specific goals you want to monitor. Initially this might be overkill if you only get a handful of questions per day, but once it starts growing you can act fast on trends. Without reporting, you’ll be practically blind which leads to delays. When determining goals, take into account that a fast response time is extremely important, especially for start ups. Responding quickly builds trust and prevents customers from walking away.
- Self service: create a Help Center with a knowledge base so customers can find answers to frequently asked questions. Most ticketing systems come with out of the box templates, but you can also find third party solutions. A good example is Lotus Themes for Zendesk. Once you have a Help Center in place, make sure to regularly update it. Use the reports to keep track of new issues and add new articles for top issues.
- Templates: make sure to use auto-responses and templates. Auto-responses are great to acknowledge receipt of a question and set expectations when they will receive feedback. Customers love being kept up to date! Templates will allow you to respond much more efficiently. You can use templates to have a consistent opening and closing, or to respond to known issues. Important: when using templates, make sure to always personalize! It’s a small effort but has a huge impact.
- Channels: the final tip is to think carefully which support channels to use for your business. Look at your customers’ demographics and think carefully how consistent you can handle different support channels. Example: while phone can be a great option to build trust, your customers might prefer to use messaging or chat. Also, phone is more complex to manage, as it requires you to pick up whenever the call comes in. I personally love messaging as a support channel. It allows customers to use tools which they already use in their private lives (text/SMS, Messenger, Whatsapp, WeChat, etc) and they can use it on the go. Most ticketing systems offer a messaging component, but there are also dedicated solutions like Quiq, Twilio or MessageBird that offer more extensive options.
These tips should get you on the right track to get started with your customer service. Should you need further help, we offer the CS Quick Scan – a thorough analysis covering all relevant aspects of your CS set up. Executed fully remotely and delivered in two weeks.
