7 Ways To Provide Amazing Customer Service for A Start-Up
So, you’ve secured a contract with a startup brand and want to put your best foot forward to show them you’re the real deal.
You want to deliver exceptional customer service support and foster a positive relationship with them. But at the moment, your idea of good customer service is upper management reactive cordiality with no proper system backing it up.
If that situation sounds eerily similar, we get it. Setting up a proper customer service system can be tough work—with a lot of moving pieces you’d need to constantly juggle.
But as difficult as it is, it’s a crucial part of maintaining a positive relationship with your clients, especially dynamic start-ups who may require urgent and time-sensitive demands. A good customer service experience can also encourage them to spread your business to their broader network, netting you more clients and leads in the process.
If you want to capitalise on that situation, you’re in the right place. We’ll give you a rundown on how you can provide a stellar customer service experience to start-ups as their trusted customer service contact.
Let’s get started.
Answer Calls and Inquiries Promptly
The first step to adopting good customer service practices is to be a quick and responsive communicator.
Ensure that the startup team can easily reach you through a dedicated phone line or an email address. For owners with a personal phone number, you should try to be close to your phone at all times to ensure that you’re not inadvertently missing an important call from this particular client.
That said, you can also get an inbound phone number instead. This number allows you to route incoming calls from your client to one of multiple open lines, allowing you to essentially delegate the call to a dedicated and available customer response team member.
This not only looks more professional, but it also frees up your personal time as the owner by giving the duty of handling inquiries to a trained staff member. It also allows your team to more quickly and assuredly pick up the phone even with multiple calls as long as you have an open line. This isn’t the case with a personal phone number when you can handle only one call at a time.
Whether you stick with a personal phone number or a business one, be sure that you’re not leaving your client hanging for more than a few hours. This plays a big role in supporting a positive working relationship with them.
Personalise The Customer Service Experience
Startups are one of the most dynamic clients you can have. Their operational processes and product lineup are often in a state of constant flux—which means that their needs can vary significantly as they scale.
To stay on top of their needs, it’s important to be in close contact with the startup in question and provide them with a service that best suits their needs.
Get to know the people working in the startup, their goals and motivations, and their demands and expectations for your company. Maintain regular communication to provide progress updates and stay informed of any changes to their goals or objectives.
You can also assign a dedicated accounts manager for these clients so that they can better understand the specific developments of the startup and make more targeted assessments. Furthermore, if your startup client has specific points of feedback after each call, ensure that you address these concerns and act upon them promptly.
By showing that you care about helping them succeed, you’ll be seen by them in a more positive light. In turn, this can strengthen your business relationship and lead to smoother and better outcomes for both parties.
Hire The Best and Train Your Staff Regularly
The people you’re setting up to handle customer queries are essentially the face of your business. As such, you’d want your customer service team to be friendly, communicative, agile, and adept at solving problems on the spot.
Besides having these sales-friendly traits, you’d also want them to know the ins and outs of your company and the client they’re handling, such as the startup. This way, they’ll be able to address concerns optimally with the full context given to them from the start.
Training them on customer service practices is also essential, even if they’re already performing well by your company’s standards. Create and constantly iterate your training methodology to educate your employees on how to succeed in their specific roles.
Providing them with this extra training helps keep them updated on the best practices and latest trends in providing exceptional customer service to others—thus enhancing your company’s reputation and further solidifying the long-term client relationship with the startup and other clients.
Equip Your Team With Tools for Success
Delivering exceptional customer service won’t be complete without equipping your team with the best customer service tools.
Having the best tools on deck allows you to support your clients to the fullest extent that you possibly can. Instead of relying on manual data tracking or flimsy gut feelings, you can access data-driven insights to better and more efficiently provide a satisfactory customer service experience to your startup client.
There are a number of tools you can consider investing in to provide better customer service. One such tool is an inbound number to handle multiple queries simultaneously and gain access to customer and agent performance data. Another tool is a customer relationship management (CRM) software to handle your startup client with better accuracy.
In any case, having the right resources can help your team deliver a more professional customer service experience for your startup client. In turn, this can make both you and your client vastly more content and productive when working together.
Establish KPIs For Your Team to Meet
Another way to ensure that your team is constantly hitting company targets is by establishing KPIs. Key performance indicators are quantifiable measures that assess a specific portion of a team or company’s performance, such as response times, resolution rate, and customer satisfaction metrics from surveys.
By putting out KPIs, your customer service team will have a more structured goal to work towards, which can give them the motivation to see their tasks through. Furthermore, it also helps you structure a proper reward system for your team’s achievers—which can be a great source of motivation for them.
Startup companies run on KPIs, and they definitely would be a boost to your reputation if your company also abides by a similar policy when it comes to dealing with them.
Offer Scalable Solutions as the Startup Grows
Customer service is all about addressing a customer’s needs and being with them every step of the way to find a good resolution.
For startups, their needs and demands may vary rapidly, meaning that your company will need to be constantly on the pulse of these changes to ensure that you meet their expectations.
To paint an example, a startup could face unprecedented growth and may require more units of a product or service you’re providing. Your budding business should be able to accommodate these requests by preparing for them beforehand to keep up with their demands.
You can also use opportunities of hardship for the startup to provide services or products that can help them go through turbulent times. By showing empathy towards your startup client, they’ll be more likely to continue their partnership with you as they navigate the business world.
Maintain a Knowledge Base of FAQs and Solutions
More often than not, your customers would like their clarifications answered quickly, especially if they’re fairly simple in nature. In a similar vein, your customer service support team would probably prefer answering only pressing and nuanced inquiries—especially if they’re short-staffed.
One way to help both parties is by creating an easily-accessible FAQ page for your client’s benefit. This helps them get an answer to their question without having to go through an entire call with your support team.
Besides creating a public FAQ page, consider also creating a solution manual for your team to use. This can serve as a reference to solve common and slightly more complex inquiries, thus helping promote uniformity and efficiency in your customer service process—all while satisfying the client.
