How Startups and Entrepreneurs Should Handle Customer Service

Customer service is one of the crucial elements of a successful startup. Each meaningful interaction with your target audience opens up a potential opportunity to improve your reputation as a reliable brand from the beginning. Most startups, however, continue to ignore customer service and often direct their resources towards product development and marketing. Though marketing builds your brand identity, only high-quality customer service can carry it forward. It’s simple math really, the better your customer service is from the start, the more your customers trust you.

Almost every market is either reaching a saturation point quickly or is already facing stiff competition. So, the only way to stand out among your competitors is to provide an exceptional experience to your customers. There is no better way to build a great personal rapport with your customers than to use dedicated and resourceful customer service.

However, this isn’t the only advantage it begets for your startup.

1. Free Publicity

Free publicity is much sought after by most startups and entrepreneurs. With limited resources and a vast array of expenses, several entrepreneurs are looking to cut costs wherever possible. Customer service is a great way to save money and generate free publicity for your emerging brand.

Providing real-time response to customers’ feedback, complaints, suggestions or queries through customer service is considerably cheaper than running a full-fledged social media marketing campaign. It is also a great platform to generate substantial word-of-mouth publicity. After all, the news of an excellent customer service experience spreads like wildfire. Nothing else can generate such publicity in a relatively short time.

2. Helps Validate Your Product or Service

Your product or service probably isn’t perfect. The best way to test the viability of your product or service is to get honest feedback from your potential customers. Transparent customer service helps you understand customer needs and problems as customers are often willing to talk to brands providing a quick and satisfactory response.

By creating an environment for open dialogue, startups can test their product or service in the early stages. You can make your product more accessible and relevant to your potential clientele and increase the chances of retaining them in the long run. Thus, it will also become easier to adjust and expand rapidly at the time of scaling up.

3. Establishes You as a Trusted Brand

As an entrepreneur who is churning out a new product or service, you have limited options to build trust among your potential customers. Things are likely to become difficult if there is an already established brand in your niche. If you have a genuine customer service team that responds swiftly and resolves issues satisfactorily, however, customers will feel that they are dealing with the right people. Obviously, they will keep coming back for more.

How to Handle Customer Service

By now, you must have understood why startups or entrepreneurs need to offer superior customer service. But, where do you begin? How can you spare the time, money, and personnel required to handle customer care when you are already short-handed? Are there any cost-effective alternatives? Which technology can help you create a sophisticated customer care strategy?

The following infographic offers to-the-point answers to all of these questions. Read on to know more about how you can improve customer service and utilize it to build a loyal consumer base.