Introduction
As of 2022, the USA alone is home to over 72,500 startups.
But can they all survive in this competitive market? Well, up to 70% of these startups fail in the first 2 to 5 years.
Another report states that 61% of customers switch to a competitor after a bad customer experience startup.
So, it is clear that to survive, your startup needs to do some real work on customer service levels.
To get you going, we have created this blog that showcases the challenges faced by startups, tips to offer high-quality service, and in the end, what benefits you as a startup owner get to experience.
So, let’s get started.
Challenges Startups Face in Offering Quality Service
Managing Tones of Customer Queries
As a startup owner, you often try to bring some unique product or service to the market. Since it might be a new idea, there are chances that your customers might come to you in the first place with a lot of questions. Hence, there might be a lot of queries for the service teams to manage.
One thing is for sure managing so many queries is not easy. They definitely need some extra help to manage it effectively. For example, if there are hundreds of customer queries generated and there are only four service agents to manage the tickets. Would it be possible for your team to offer quality support?
In such situations, apart from handling queries, offering correct customer service solutions for startups can also get difficult. And this is not a one-time thing; service departments tend to face these problems on a daily basis.
Leaving Up to Customer Expectations
Customers expect service agents to offer 24/7 support to help them find an appropriate solution for their queries. So, many times they adopt a shift-based model so that customer service agents are available all the time. But most of them fail to do so due to reasons ranging from not finding the right professionals to work on a shift-based model, not having the budget to adopt it, etc.
In the end, what happens is your customer service does not match the expectations of your customers, and in worst-case scenarios, your customer might end up switching to your competitor. Also, this was just one example of customers’ expectations. Similarly, there are many expectations that they have from your business, and you need to make sure you leave them up to them.
Not Responding to the Customer Quickly
90% of customers expect an immediate response when they have a customer service question, with 60% defining “immediate” as 10 minutes or less. So, offering quick responses and solutions is very crucial. But why are service teams not able to respond quickly to customers’ queries? Let’s see.
Here are the reasons why customer service agents fail to respond quickly to customer queries:
- Overload of customer queries
- The service process is a lot more complex
- Lack of tools to bring efficiency to the floor
- Not having the facility to use automation
All these factors keep the service agents away from offering quality customer service.
Offering Omnichannel Service
Customers these days use more than one channel to reach out to the customer service department. Channels such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, Email, call, web forms, and live chat software for startups. But are they getting the service that they expect from the service departments? No. The service departments of some businesses find it extremely difficult to offer omnichannel support.
Let’s see what the challenges they most often face in offering omnichannel support:
- Not being able to cover every single social media platform
- Taking too long to respond to customer queries
- Due to a lack of data and not knowing which platforms the customers prefer
- Not using suitable software to offer omnichannel support
As omnichannel support is a great way to interact with your customers and offer them quality service, do not let these issues affect you. Start using the right software to ensure that you offer quality service to your customers. Apart from providing omnichannel support, it also offers many other crucial features that will revolutionize the way you offer customer service.
Effective Customer Service Tips for Startups to Follow
Empower Your Customers with Self-service
Self-service is one of the most effective ways to keep offering customer service to your customers even when your service agents are not available. It allows the customers to help themselves without depending on service agents. Customers can just visit your company’s website and access the knowledge base or FAQs and refer to the articles or the answers respectively.
This way, you as a business can enhance your customer’s experience and also ensure that they get timely solutions even if your agents are not available. Self-service is also very convenient as it can be easily accessed from anywhere at any time.
One other added benefit of using self-service is that you can refer to the articles or the answers over and over again whenever you need it; it is not a one-time thing. Apart from the knowledge base and FAQs, self-service can also be offered via community forums, video tutorials, etc.
Make the Workflow Simple for Your Service Agents
Complex workflow leads to unhappy customers, as when the process of solving customer queries is complex, more time will be consumed to find out a solution. Also, after taking so much time, a proper solution might not be offered to the customers.
All these small factors might affect a lot of the customers and create a negative impression of your business. That is why it is crucial to have a simple yet effective workflow so that the agents can manage the customer queries easily and offer correct solutions to the customers on time.
Here are a few benefits of having a simple customer service workflow:
Meet Your Customers at Their Preferred Platforms
Nowadays, the demands of customers are increasing when it comes to customer service. They want businesses to offer them support on the platform that they prefer to use. In short, they want convenient options available so that they can easily connect with your customer service department in case something goes wrong.
omnichannel support is also important when you look at it from a business perspective because brands with top omnichannel customer engagement see a 9.5% yearly increase in annual revenue, compared to 3.4% for poor omnichannel brand strategies.
Furthermore, as per research, solid omnichannel brands witness a 7.5% yearly decrease in cost per contact. So, offering omnichannel support to customers is not only beneficial for your customers but also beneficial for your business as well.
Pre-defined Solutions for Common Customer Issues
Every day a lot of customers raise queries, and some of the queries might be similar to one another. But, just imagine how much of your time can get consumed if you can only reply to a single query at once and keep on repeating the same process hundreds of times in a single day. A great way to save yourself from all this unwanted hustle is to use canned responses.
For example, 150 queries are raised, among which 50 queries are similar, instead of replying to those 50 queries separately. What you can do is, prepare a canned response for that particular query and send it to all 50 customers at once. By following this simple process, you can save yourself a lot of time and increase your productivity as well.
Note: If some particular query is raised too often, you can also create a canned response and put it in the FAQs section of your website.
Use Tools that Help in Offering Quality Customer Service
Everyone needs a little help, and it is no different with customer service. Customer service is a hectic process, where no matter how many customer queries you have managed, there will still be a long queue of queries waiting for you to respond.
Having so many queries to look after overloads the work of the service agents, and the outcome might be negative. That is why having the right tools with impactful helpdesk features can be helpful for the customer service department.
Here are the benefits of using a powerful tool to offer quality customer service:
- Streamline the customer service workflow
- Increases the collaboration among the team
- Improves agent’s productivity
- Gives you valuable insights into the data
- Automates the repetitive tasks
- Allows you to offer omnichannel support
Note: It is very important to choose an appropriate tool or software that suits your business requirements to get desired results.
Collect Your Customer’s Feedback
Startups are constantly working on their product or service to make them more and more suitable for their customers. What better way to improve them than asking for feedback from your customers? Customer feedback can be the most effective way to know how your customers feel about your offerings.
They are the only ones for whom you are optimizing your product/service, so it’s very important to know how they feel about it and what changes they want in it to make it more convenient for them. Being a startup, always remember to collect feedback from your customers and, more importantly, act on it as soon as possible.
Set Trackable Goals
Goals are the motivation that drives every individual to give their 100% in order to achieve them. So, in customer service also, you can set such trackable goals. So your customer service team can have a better understanding of what they need to do and what is expected from them.
But one thing that every customer service department should remember is that instead of setting unrealistic goals, they should set realistic goals. So that they can track them easily and understand which areas need improvement. For example, when you are setting goals, do not set a goal of handling 1000 customer queries per agent in a single day. Instead, make it 100; it is easily achievable.
What happens is when they set unrealistic goals instead of motivating the service teams, it demotivates them. As they get overloaded with a lot of queries and start feeling it is unachievable. But when they set realistic goals, they know they can achieve them and can give their 100%.
Keep Response Time Down to Enhance Customer Experience
Customer service is all about attentiveness and alertness. You need to be alert when your customers reach out to you, expecting a solution to their queries. And you need to be attentive in order to understand their issues properly and provide them with a timely solution.
If you take too long to respond, it will hamper their experience, as 90% of customers expect an immediate response when they have a customer service question, with 60% defining “immediate” as 10 minutes or less. So, if you take hours or days, it is going to be of no use.
You need to ensure that you are quick enough to respond to customers’ queries within the next few minutes after the query is generated. This way, by offering high-quality service, you can build a base of loyal customers, as 83% of customers agree that they feel more loyal to brands that respond to and resolve their complaints quickly.
How Can A Startup Benefit from Quality Customer Service?
Understand Customers Better
As a startup, it is crucial for you to know about your customers. So that you can optimize your product/service accordingly. One effective way to do so is by offering quality customer service. It ensures that you interact with your customers effectively and help them solve their queries quickly.
And while you are in the process of solving their query, you can make sure that you get some insights about your customers to know them better. You can know about their behavior, what kind of queries they have, what they like about your service/product, what they do not like about it, etc. This way, by offering quality customer service, you can better understand your customers.
Note: To know your customers better, you can also ask them to fill out the feedback forms.
Encourages Customers to Make a Repeat Purchase
Offering quality service enhances the customer’s experience; it makes them feel special. They feel like your business cares for them, as you are offering them the help that they need when they face any issues. It is important because existing customers are the ones who bring more revenue to the business when compared to new customers.
And when analyzed from a financial perspective, attracting new customers has proven to be costlier than retaining the existing ones. So, when customers are offered quality services, they feel special and get encouraged to make a repeat purchase. This way, they stay with your business for a longer period of time.
Boosts Your Brand Sales
For customer success for startups, increasing their revenue is extremely crucial, as it opens up a lot of opportunities for them to grow their business. Revenue is also one of the major factors to determine whether a particular business has been successful or not.
So, in order to increase revenue, first of all, a brand needs to focus on increasing its sales. They need to ensure that more and more customers purchase from their brand. This will only happen if the business offers all the necessary services to the customers.
From high-quality products to high-quality customer service, every single factor is crucial. When offering high-quality service, customer satisfaction and loyalty increase. Their trust in your business also grows, which in turn can have a positive impact on your brand’s sales.
Creates a Positive Image of Your Brand
Customers can make or break any business. As a business, you must focus on creating such an impression that they should be loyal to your brand and not any other aspects of your business. For example, if you launch a new product and your customers do not like it that much. You need to create such an image that, even in such situations, they do not leave your brand.
How to create such a positive image? Many things can be done to turn prospects into loyal customers. But one thing that stands out and speaks loads about your brand is customer service. It is one of the most underrated aspects to make your loyal customers. By offering quality service, you can make your customer feel that you care for them and are available whenever they need your help.
Gives a Competitive Edge
Offering quality customer service has many perks, but one of the most crucial ones is having a competitive edge over your competitors. For example, when a few brands (including yours) are competing for the same business (apparel business), only you are the one offering high-quality customer service.
In this situation, if the other competitors provide special offers to your customers, even then, your customers will not leave your brand. As they know, only you are going to help them when they need help. Also, you can attract a few customers from your competitors as well. This way, you can easily get a competitive edge by just offering high-quality customer service.
Spreads Positive Word of Mouth
Positive word of mouth can do wonders for your startup. It might not be considered marketing, but it is the best way your brand gets marketed that too with zero investment. Just imagine you get more customers, more sales, more revenue, etc., by not even investing a single penny.
It can be that little push that every customer wants, in order to complete the purchase. For example, a customer has added a product to his/her cart and is confused about whether or not to purchase it. In such scenarios, he/she will be in search of that positive factor that clears the picture for them.
So, when a friend or a family member says a few positive words about your brand, it clears out their confusion, and the customer can now go through with the purchase. No marketing will be able to do what positive word of mouth can do for your business.
Retaining Customers Becomes Easy
If a startup wants to grow effectively, it needs to make a lot of loyal customers and has to put in constant efforts to retain them. Because as per a study, existing customers bring more revenue to your business, and it also costs less to retain them. But what can be done to retain your customers? You can start by offering high-quality service.
It ensures that your customers get the help that they need, and it also enhances their experience, as you offer them 24/7 customer support to solve their problems easily and quickly. Apart from offering high-quality customer service, you can also consider the below factors to retain your customers.
- Ask for customer feedback.
- Offer personalized shopping experiences
- Provide quick delivery options
- Build customer loyalty through shared values
An Easy-to-use Help desk Software for Your Startup
Modern day businesses need modern tools to forge meaningful experiences with your customers. As every investment you make impacts your business in someway, it is important to carefully choose the right customer support software for your startup. You need a cost-effective and advanced solution that’s easy to use. Well, that’s when DeskXpand enters.
It is a perfect help desk software helping you to put an end to your customer service issues. It can help you track customer conversations, automate repetitive tasks, and close customer tickets in a faster manner. Get in touch with us to help you understand how it will work for your business.
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