How To Provide Excellent Customer Service

How do you win through providing excellent customer service as a startup business?

Excellent customer service is so vital for startups. Yet, for many, it is an afterthought, if a thought at all. Startups need to account for customer support as part of their business plan and understand the people involved to deliver great support to customers. Below is a video in this regard where you will be able to learn how to write a business plan.

Follow these tips that will upgrade your game and fuel the success of your venture faster and for the long term.

The Importance Of Customer Service

Customer service will make or break your startup.

Poor customer service can kill your venture even before you really get started. It can sabotage you, even once you believe you've reached a reasonably large measure of success. It is often the Achilles heel that takes down big businesses. No matter how genius, needed, and less expensive your product is, if the customer service isn't great, you won't get very far. 

Yet, excellent customer service alone can provide an incredible edge to grab a market share against bigger and better-funded incumbents. It may be the one thing you can compete best on and build a business on.

You already know this. Though, so few put it into practice. 

Think about the bad customer service experiences you'd had. How did that make you feel about the business? How has it impacted how you've spoken about them, reviewed them, and considered who you buy from and give your loyalty in the future?

In contrast, what are some of the best customer experiences you've had? How has that made you feel about them? How is that impacting what you tell others and your shopping or business habits?

You generally don't get a second chance at this. Make sure you get it right from the start and make it a key component of the business model.

Make Excellent Customer Service A Top Priority

You may even want to make excellent customer service the main theme of your business. Even above your product. 

Customers may forgive slow delivery, a mediocre product, and swallow a higher price tag if the customer service is awesome. Yet, even if your prices are the lowest in the industry, you have the best product ever and you deliver fast, you won't keep customers without leading service experiences.

You get what you focus on.

Consider making this one of your core company values. Write it down and publish it.

Hire For It

Just as you proactively hire for other values and talents, be sure you are hiring for service. 

How does each of your potential hires view the importance of customer service? Are they responsive themselves? How do they come across? In the early days, all of your team members may be charged with helping out in customer service.

Make sure you have enough coverage for customer service. It doesn't matter how fast you can produce product if you don't have a team to support new sales inquiries and customer concerns with deliveries. 

Customer service may actually be your first hire. You may need to scale this department with temporary or part-time staff and on-demand remote team members. This is also not the department to cut in trying times when customer service needs a surge.

Reward It

You get more of what you reward. 

Are you intentionally looking for opportunities to reward delivering excellent customer service? Are you highlighting issues where it is not delivered?

Have a system for this.

Empower Excellent Customer Service

Companies spend a lot of time talking about service, and very little actually making it happen. 

You can say it is a priority and tell your teams to deliver it, but if you aren't allowing them to do it, what use is that? It will rot your company from the inside out.

Give your team members the power to deliver on it. 

It's like that one bank which has the big signs saying they pride themselves on customer service 'courtesy'. Yet, they can't do anything for their customers. Saying you can't help with a smile, might be better than a bad attitude, but it won't really help for long. 

Provide The Right Customer Service Channels

You might like to hide behind email, but if your customers don't use email, and prefer conversing through the phone, text, WhatsApp, live chat, or social, you aren't really serving them. 

Be where they need you to be. It's about them, not you.

You should have completed customer personas long ago. The main part of this should have been to define what mediums they are on. If there is a gap, go back, and conduct this research again.

Listen & Implement

Listen to your customer service team members who are on the frontlines. Listen to your customer feedback. Even listen to the interactions between these two parties. 

Then act on it. Listening is important. Yet, it is just a source of frustration for everyone if you don't implement and execute on it. 

It's really hard to stay connected to that frontline as a CEO. Respect that those filing this important role for you may know better than you. 

Don't Rely On Industry Benchmarks

Some industries have terrible customer service standards. Those with big monopolies and just a few major players are the worst. Each often only benchmarks itself against the others. If they deliver just slightly less terrible service than the others, they think they are doing great. That's not acceptable or excellent customer service. Consumers and B2B clients won't put up with it for long. It just opens the door for a new entrant to claim massive amounts of market share fast - because they choose to deliver better on service than the rest.