Startup Customer Support Needs a Part in the Process
When starting out, marketing and product are what you’re focused on, but support should be tied into that focus, too. Why?
- Customer support tells you what’s wrong with your product
- Customer support tells you what’s on your user’s mind when they think about your product (helps with marketing)
Customer support gives you what you need to appeal to your customers. Yes, it helps support the customer journey, but it also supports your journey as you start to build and expand.
The feedback you get from customer support is exactly what you need as a startup. It gives you the tools necessary to better your marketing and product moving forward.
Customer support can make or break a company, and that is especially important to note as a startup — you don’t want to fall apart before you’ve even begun.
Use these tips to help you get on the right track:
This may seem like an obvious tip, but one of the biggest mistakes startups make is underappreciating the value of customer support.
Startups can underestimate the time and resources required to provide great customer support because they simply forget about the need for it.
Try to make it a priority to build great customer support from the start — if you value it, things will be easier and some things like marketing and product updates may just fall into place.
Channel matters. The type of support you choose to make available to your customers will impact how they feel about your company and whether or not they feel valued.
The right channel should support your customers in the best way possible — automate as much as you can in regards to support. The product is what draws people in, your support piece is how people can report their problems.
You don’t always need a live human to report problems, but users need a backup to do so. Having something like ChipBot blends the nature of a knowledge base channel inside the frame of a chatbot.
ChipBot gives you single channel support that allows you to organize like a knowledge base and interact with customers like a chatbot. It is layered support — automation to filter 80% of common questions and then fallbacks for human support.
Feedback is one of the most important parts of customer support. Not only does it give you what you need to build better marketing and product, but it also allows you to relate directly to your customers.
Especially as a startup, listening to what your customers are saying will help you create relationships with them and adjust your product and website accordingly. Those relationships and little adjustments are key to keep moving forward with your startup.
For that reason, you want to get as much feedback as possible, so your support should facilitate this. For example, add a survey to the end of any customer service interaction so that you know how it went.
This is not a waste of time. Setting goals for your customer support will help you envision what you want to get out of it and will allow you to get a handle on it.
If you have a strategy in place, you are more likely to reach your goals and continue improving. But without a goal in mind, you don’t have anything to work towards and there will be no way to measure your success.
Example goals:
- Speed up response times
- Create a customer-centered culture
- Improve follow-up protocol
- Strengthen your customer onboarding
- Improve how you measure customer service
You don’t want your customer support to be just like any other customer support system users come across — that doesn’t differentiate you from anyone.
If your customer support is boring and bland, your customers will think that your company is also boring and bland. You need to set up support in a way that allows customers to see what you are really about.
As a startup, you don’t yet have a defined brand or culture, so you’re in a good place to set up your support to help define your future culture and improve your brand reputation.
Along with these tips, you may want to consider a support system that will be your framework and facilitation for all support. That way, you can focus on getting off the ground while still appealing to customers.
Some support systems to consider:
- Knowledge base
- Helpdesk
- Support Bot
A Support Bot serves users on all pages and operates continuously throughout the day and night. Bots offer identical support to live chat without using real or augmented conversations.
The bonus of having an autonomous bot that works 24/7 is the continuous data stream of interaction, questions, and email addresses you receive. Your user engagement data starts to fill out and trends begin to form.
As a startup, you will most likely want to find an affordable (or free) solution, like ChipBot, to get started with. ChipBot naturally blends the features of all the support systems into one easy to use solution.
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