Love it or hate it but corporate customer service provides a way for customers to contact the company regarding a specific issue. This is crucial for any startup out there. Allowing your customers to easily contact you regarding any problem can be make or break in the long run.

As a startup you have one really clear advantage over a corporate company – size, speed and personality. Where a large corporate provides customer service, it generally leans towards a faceless agent with lengthy wait times and sometimes no resolutions at all.

Being that you can personally contact each individual customer and answer their problems and even conduct product research you ultimately have a big advantage that needs to be used to your best ability.

In the long run a positive customer service experience ensures that customers stay with you for longer as they have issues solved and their thoughts are listened to. Something else worth considering is that many people expect to have some level of support especially if you are a SaaS platform or tech based. Technical help is crucial for removing any friction when customers are trying to achieve their goals.

General service/happiness statistics/customer expectations

They expect to be able to reach you via at least three channels – essentially live chat, email and, this is more for stores, face-to-face (especially for complex issues).

  • >80% of customers expect a company to respond within 24 hours.
  • 3 in 10 customers expect a reply to an email within an hour.
  • 72% of customers expect the customer service agent to know their contact information, product information, and service history when they contact a company for customer service.
  • 60% of consumers would prefer to contact customer support via WhatsApp

Let us break down what exceptional customer service should look like to your customers:

Accessible across multiple channels

This is straightforward, some people prefer talking and some do not, the option should be nice and easy with multiple methods of contact for your customers. You can use a digital asset management solution to store all history of conversations too. 

Very responsive

Waiting for 3 days to hear back that there’s nothing that can be done is very soul destroying, so ensuring you are communicating everything clearly is vital to managing customers expectations.

Personalized

The last thing that the customer needs or wants is to go through and provide all of the little details of their information. This is incredibly useful not only for the customer but yourself too – time management in customer service is really important so that you don’t get sucked into spending more time than you should. For instance, at BrushGalaxy customers who select digital art brushes often also pair their choices together with procreate curly hair brushes to create digital illustrations (e.g., elephant wall art). When emails are personalized using the right email marketing design based on this particular information they convert better. 

Efficient solutions

Problems get solved quickly and with a high success rate otherwise going back and forth will only decrease the customer experience. 

The above points on exceptional customer service and not too far out there. These are all things that we have complained about with companies before, so there’s no doubt we have first hand experience – avoid making the same mistake as these corporate companies that fail on customer service.

How to implement this high-quality customer service

So you know the importance of exceptional customer service for your SaaS, you understand that offering high quality customer service is a sustainable and effective way of marketing your SaaS; you know the details of what customers expect and want from customer service and now you need to implement this into your project. 

For a startup this can be the tricky part. If you need help, a marketing freelancer can be an invaluable resource. As a sole founder it can almost feel impossible but do not fear, the next section is here where we will show you some tips and ideas on customer service implementation.

Live Chat

The quickest and easiest way to engage in a customer service conversation is through a simple but versatile live chat widget. This can be anywhere on your website that you feel is applicable, it can operate 24 hours of the day capturing emails and messages and setting customer expectations with automated messages. 

A reliable website development company can help you implement and customize a live chat widget that seamlessly integrates with your SaaS portal. Additionally, there are many good CRM tools that provide world-class customer support with email, phone service, and chat helpdesk. There are even some free CRMs available.

Self Service

This can be a support centre with FAQs or a community section where your customers respond to eachother (this is for the larger startups). Providing a self-service method of troubleshooting really helps to make customers feel that they are at least making some progress even whilst waiting for your reply. 

There have been many times when we have found solutions to problems thanks to an easy-to-use support desk (e.g., a school help desk in the education sector) that enabled us to search for similar issues. If the problem wasn’t there, something might tick in my head and make me realise a solution. Either way if it doesn’t provide an answer it can at least stimulate some ideas for self fixing.

Focus on Onboarding

A lot of customer service questions, especially with SaaS platforms, generally are about the technical aspects of the platform. 

“How to find X” or “how to do Y”

Many of these questions can be answered through an effective FAQ but ultimately this needs to be limited. The best way to do this would be to implement an onboarding session – a demo call, a demo video on Youtube or just a really handy and easy to find documentation system so everything can be followed in an easy 1, 2, 3 method. Additionally, you might get advice from professional content writers working in a fractional content team on how to create an excellent FAQ.

Customer onboarding should eliminate the basic customer service questions and problems but it does require some time to document, record and make public so plan ahead and store all recurring problems that keep coming up.

User Context

As mentioned above, customers expect you to know them and their subscription, so you need to ensure that this is easy to access when you are dealing with the customer service request.

User context speeds up the process of knowing the little technical details as well as just making the entire process efficient for both yourself and your customers.

Shared Inbox

Lost or forgotten messages because a channel was not properly monitored is a common issue when you are a small team or have multiple projects. Time and focus are pulled everywhere so it’s always going to be an issue which only affects the long term customer happiness and can increase churn.

Shared inbox for live chats

There are multiple projects which all have multiple support channels, this can be daunting as you would need to switch tabs or log in and out etcc and that’s not efficient. 

Shared inboxes provide an easy way to pull all of the support channels into one location, partner up with your team to tackle issues and discuss things before double sending or sharing incorrect information. 

Overall the customer service experience increases with tools and improving your set up. This is crucial to the bottom line of your business, especially when you are a startup and need every customer to stick around and help you improve the product.

Conclusion

Failing to prepare is preparing to fail as the famous saying goes. Take the time to set up a solid customer service experience, no matter how many customers you have, to ensure churn is minimized, customers become advocates and product development comes from genuine feedback that is provided via customer service.