Customer service is extremely important regardless of what business stage you are in.
However, if your business is new, there’s very little margin for error. Acquiring your first customers is an uphill battle so every single one of them matters.
Moreover, your brand reputation is so fragile at that point that even a few bad reviews might be enough to tank your company.
That’s why you can’t afford to let anyone down. So how can you keep your customers happy in those early days?
It’s way too common for entrepreneurs to see customer service as an afterthought that isn’t worth pouring resources into.
Often, they aren’t even aware of this mindset because it tends to be implicit rather than explicit.
You may genuinely believe that you care about your customers but your true priorities are shown by how you allocate your resources.
So if customer service only gets scraps, you are not giving it the attention it deserves.
We recommend reading “How I Did It: Zappos’s CEO on Going to Extremes for Customers”.
In this case study, Tony Hsieh explains why they prioritized customer service at Zappos:
“Our philosophy has been that most of the money we might ordinarily have spent on advertising should be invested in customer service, so that our customers will do the marketing for us through word of mouth.”
He details the lengths that they went to in order to provide excellent customer service, including relocating the entire company from San Francisco to Las Vegas, a drastic move that cost half a million dollars.
And in case you are wondering why they couldn’t simply outsource it:
“We were reluctant to outsource the call center, because we’d had bad experiences with outsourcing in the past. In fact, one of the big lessons of Zappos’s first few years was that it never makes sense to outsource your core competency, especially if your aim is to be maniacal about customer service.”
The quote above reveals something important about the company’s attitude towards customer service: their aim was to be “maniacal” about it. We believe that this should be the main takeaway from the case study.
After all, if you have a new business, your resources are probably limited, so you won’t be able to implement most of what Hsieh talks about. But what you can do is make customer service your top priority, just like Zappos did!
New business owners sometimes make the mistake of overselling their products and services.
They do that in their marketing materials, during sales calls, and when interacting with potential customers face-to-face. Anything to get a sale.
That is shortsighted because it inevitably leads to having a bunch of unhappy customers who are angry at you because they feel that you misled them.
That’s why it’s so important to set clear expectations right from the start:
Doing these three things can help you protect your brand’s reputation, reduce churn and build goodwill!
Personally send every new customer an email where you introduce yourself, thank them for their purchase, and encourage them to reach out to you if they need any help.
Just make sure to differentiate this email from the automated onboarding emails. You can do that with a casual subject line, something like “Hey there – just wanted to say hi!”.
Here are three things that you can do to improve your onboarding experience:
We also recommend reading “The Elements of User Onboarding” by Samuel Hulick.
This book focuses on customer onboarding in the SaaS context, but some of the general principles can be applied to other types of businesses as well.
Y-Combinator is one of the best-known startup accelerators in the world.
One of the techniques that they are teaching their founders is the so-called “Collinson Installation”.
It’s named after the Collinson brothers who would ask people at Y-Combinator events if they’d be interested in trying Stripe. Whenever someone said yes, the brothers would respond with “Right then, give me your laptop” and set them up on the spot.
Keep in mind that people who are interested in your product or service don’t always have the mental bandwidth to set everything up themselves. They might start procrastinating on it or simply forget about it.
That’s why it often makes more sense to just do it for them. Of course, you won’t be able to keep this up forever, but this approach can work well in the early stages!
People are used to dealing with large companies that offer customer support 24/7/365.
However, new businesses typically don’t have the resources to provide customer support around the clock. So how can you meet the customers’ expectations?
That is going to depend on how critical your product or service is.
If your customers are relying on you to help them with something that is absolutely essential, you will need to set notifications on your phone and be on call until you can afford to start hiring customer support agents. There’s just no way around it.
However, if your product or service isn’t essential, then you should be able to maintain a more sane work schedule.
Make it clear on your website what your office hours are and provide a timeframe within which the customers can expect to get a response (e.g. one business day).
Generally speaking, the reason people start freaking out when they don’t get an immediate response is not the lack of response itself, but the sense of uncertainty and feeling ignored.
For example, if someone submits a customer support ticket on a Friday evening and they don’t hear back from you for the entire weekend, they might start spamming you with increasingly angry messages.
However, if that same person knows that you finish work at 5 PM on Friday and start again at 9 AM on Monday, they probably won’t freak out because they will expect to get a response on Monday.
If your business is still in its early stages, you probably have some misconceptions about what matters the most to your customers.
That’s why it’s so important to proactively solicit customer feedback. You can do that in several ways:
You want to store all this data in some sort of a centralized database so that you can analyze it later. Notion can work well for this. Over time, patterns will begin to emerge!
Wufoo famously sends their customers hand-written thank you notes by mail.
At first, they would send a thank you note to each new user, which they did for as long as they could until eventually it became unsustainable.
Now, nearly two decades later, they still take time each week to write and send thank you notes to a handful of customers. It has become a company tradition!
This proved to be an effective way to improve customer retention. Apparently, customers who received hand-written thank you notes were much less likely to churn than the ones who didn’t.
Considering that in the early stages, every single customer matters, taking a page from Wufoo’s playbook and experimenting with hand-written thank you notes might be a good idea!
ClickFunnels is an all-in-one marketing platform that has everything you need to launch, manage, and grow an online business, including:
Let’s be real:
We are biased in favor of our software.
So we understand if you take what we say about it with a grain of salt.
Fortunately, we have a free 14-day trial, so you don’t have to take our word for it.
You can go and see ClickFunnels for yourself without any risk!
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