The Single Most Important Customer Service Advice For Startups

Good customer service is one of the hardest things to achieve, yet one of the most important. Handling your customers’ needs in a proper way can really make you stand out from the competition, earn you trust and make you more recognizable. Not to mention that bad relationship with your customers can cost you a lot of money.

It is important to mention also that there is a big difference between customer service in a startup and in a big company. Large businesses have tons of different enquiries from customers all the time and they need to prioritize them and live with the fact that there is no way to keep 100% of the customer satisfied. But for a small company things are way different as every lost client is a missed opportunity and means a lot.

In this article we will focus on startups, because the right way to build solid relationship with your customers is just in the beginning when you are still small.

So what’s exactly the single and most important customer service advice for startups? The right answer is: Being always there.

Being always available for your customers is what will make you stand out from other companies. People like to be served quickly and to know that there is always somebody that will answer their questions. Big companies cannot do that or if they are able to do it, it costs a lot of money. But small business owners can achieve it at a lower cost just by following some simple rules.

One of the most important things is to have an idea of how much interaction with customers you will have. If you do not expect a lot of enquires in the beginning, it is a good idea to answer your customers’ question yourself. Being served by the person who runs the business will definitely make them fill special and show them you care about their needs. If you do not have that much time, you can also ask each member of your team to serve customer requests. As to the method to interact with customers, you can simply provide a separate email address like support@yourdomain.com.

(Tip: If you are an Oxxy users, you can create an email alias for support and then add your team members as responders. This way they will receive all mails sent to the email alias. Here you can learn more about this function.)

At some point, your business will, hopefully, grow bigger and more and more customers will come with different questions, problems or requests. That is the time when you should think of a more sophisticated method of customer service. You can hire one or a few customer support representatives to serve the requests. It is also a good idea to provide a few more ways for your customers to contact you. For example, we at Oxxy offer a bunch of different support channels in order to guarantee that our customers interact with us in the most convenient way for them. You can reach us via our live chat, email, phone or even via social media.

And no matter what is the size of your business, you must try to be always available. Of course, that does not mean you will stay online for 24/7, but trying to answer customers’ queries in your free time will only help you.

But no matter how important it is to be always there for your customers, you must not forget all other rules for good customer support – being polite, being patient, being able to understand people’s needs, being good at communicating and many others.