Customer Support for Startups: Getting it Right the First Time

Startups have a variety of options for getting customer support up and running. With the advent of new technology seemingly every day, deciding which systems and tools to incorporate into your customer support arsenal are virtually unlimited. These tools include phone, live chat, email, social media and other customer support tools.

Unfortunately, with all these options at the ready, it can be difficult to get things right without a considerable amount of trial and error. CBInsights has studied more than 100 “postmortems” of failed startups, with more than half of those surveyed attributing their demise to customer support, like ignoring customers, unfriendly UX and lack of passion.

Read below to ensure your customer support strategy and platforms at your startup are assets — not a liability.

Choose Your Strategy

Choosing the right customer support software, figuring out its framework and functionality, and determining how it will scale comes down to timing. As an early stage startup with less than five employees, managing customer support is often fluid and sporadic.

Of course, gaining plenty of customer feedback is invaluable during the beta stage, but things like product-market fit and usability take precedence. This stage involves multiple people replying to support tickets via just an email address.

Once the employee count has doubled and customer growth is steady, it makes sense to invest in customer support software and customer-focused employees. Your industry and business model will help you decide which support system works best for your business.

For example, a project management software startup with a high number of users may be best served with a live chat tool and self-serve help center. Meanwhile, a real estate startup may be better served with live phone support with a dedicated staff who can handle sensitive issues that arise during the home-buying process.

Do it Yourself (or Don’t?)

During a startup’s infancy, almost all founders and key executives are on the front lines of customer support, as they should be. However, you should maximize the value of that time spent. With that in mind, make it a point to provide your full name and title (CEO & founder) via any support call or email, so customers see and recognize your dedication.

Additionally, you’ll often hear that you should “take a personal interest in customer issues” and “do things that don’t scale” during the early startup period. What does this mean in practice? Take the “Collison installation” as an example.

Stripe, a payment processing startup, has already achieved hypergrowth and global expansion. But as the eight-year-old company fought for early adoption, co-founders (and brothers) John and Patrick Collison used an unconventional and semi-impractical onboarding approach.

When someone agreed to try the Stripe beta, instead of sending a link or email, the Collisons would personally install the software on the prospect’s laptop. This unscalable approach seems trivial, but many credit the strategy for Stripe’s explosive growth. Indeed, this type of personal interaction can improve customer retention, but more importantly can also lead to compound growth through word of mouth.

However, there are two important caveats to the DIY approach:

  1. Buckle up, buttercup: Not all heroes wear capes; they put on headsets. Certain CEOs, whether they’re coding savants or visionary leaders, aren’t always adept with customer service. Ultimately, beyond getting some rude comments, this will inevitably anger and confuse some customers. Thus, whoever is running support needs to get value from the interactions and pass feedback to the team. If you’re not able to be effective, consider a chief customer officer as an early hire.
  2. Speed is king: Understand that keeping response time down is critical for any support avenue you choose. Unsurprisingly, the number of customers who expect their email to be answered within the hour rose from about 15 percent to nearly 40 percent during the past few years, according to Arise.

The Ultimate Goal: Closing the Customer Feedback Loop

When startups scale to the point of being enterprises, a final shift is needed for customer support. As customers and employees reach a critical mass, there must be systems in place that create a valuable customer feedback loop. For example, there must be adequate support to balance genuine customers interactions with optimization, primarily through these main areas:

  1. Community Management is needed when a customer base becomes an ecosystem. Customers benefit from talking with other customers or people who use the platform differently. For example, e-commerce platform Shopify offers an open API, so it’s necessary to have a website and resources developed for engineers and developers. This also involves employee feedback and social media insights, all of which need to be accounted for.
  2. Customer Success is a culmination of everything above and the successful evolution of customer support. This team may be an umbrella over customer support, but it will look for more broad solutions through churn surveys (canceled customer feedback, customer health scores and renewal strategies). Ultimately, this team will be in charge of making sure customer feedback is incorporated into the product roadmap process, as failure to do so will upend even the most stellar customer support.

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