Great support is critical for the success of every organization.
Even more so in a start-up where each customer is critical to the business. The level of support provided to customers is almost as important as the level of the product, and in start-ups where the product is growing with the company and has not fully matured, great support could be the tipping point between getting that extra patience that is needed to shape up and churn and failure.
Yet for many start-ups support is an afterthought when starting.
Treat support like you treat your product
The approach to establishing support should be similar to the approach you bring to your product. Think of your support as an additional product or service which integrates with your own product. Instead of opting for the cookie-cutter approach to support, invest thought in your target audience, how they communicate with you, how you’d like to communicate with them, and what sets your support apart from your competition. You’d be surprised how many customers are unhappy with the level of support they get from your competition. Scope it out, just like you scope the features of their products. Make your customer support a strong selling point for your product.
Take the proactive instead of being reactive
Invest in the documentation and integrate your support straight into the product so that customers can reach self-help quickly and easily reach out to you when needed, pushing for self-help will make using your product a great experience, it will assist on the entire customer life-cycle and will help you invest less in headcount later on when your customer base grows.
Support your support
Put thought into the troubleshooting tools you develop and include in your product, the more tools you provide to the team that will do the support, the faster you are able to identify and solve issues. Putting the burden of troubleshooting on your team and not your customers are key for great customer service. If you anticipate the issues your customers might experience you can empower your team to do wonderful things on their own.
Build to scale
Will it work if you have x10 more customers? How about x100? And x1000?
This is the question you should ask for any support policy/process you design, if the answer is no, then go back to the drawing board. It’s easy for Startups to provide amazing support when they start, this is because of the relatively low amount of customers and because the support is usually in focus because you fight for every customer, but that can actually be a double-edged sword. You want to enable your support to be great throughout your growth and to establish that you need to set the right flow and processes that will stand strong over time.
