Starting a businesses is hard specificly when it comes to customer support for startups. Generally, there’s a small starting team in which every single person has a key role to play in advancing production. In the middle of trying to make every aspect thrive, it’s difficult to set up customer support for startups response program, train staff for it, and continue to build it up as the company expands. Despite that, many brand-new startups are still hesitant to invest in outsourcing customer service, yet good customer service is absolutely essential directly from the start and needs to continue to be maintained as production grows.
A drop in customer service satisfaction is a drop in customers, which means stalled growth. We’re pretty sure that’s not what any new startup wants, and no one can afford to hurt their customer base while they’re still in the fragile, early stages. The goal of outsourcing customer support is to increase positive experiences by having an entire team already trained and dedicated to providing excellent service.
Why Customer Support for Startups is Hard
We know, customer service for startups can be tricky. Where do you prioritize your attention and efforts? In the beginning, it can seem easy enough to do it yourself and have every team member respond to complaints or questions via email. Maybe it’s a rotation, or different issues automatically go to different people. The problem is that eventually, when business increases, it becomes harder and harder to keep up.
Startup Questions on Customer Service
What do you do now? Hire more people and train them to respond to emails properly? Then do you have to train them on other skills like phone calls, live chat, and replying to a review or comment in full view of the internet public? How long will it take to train them? How do you assess quality? Oh no, how long does it take to create your own quality guidelines? Will they have to learn new skills on unfamiliar technology platforms?
All of these questions are now up in the air if you’re taking it on yourself. It does take time to train new staff, even more so when they’re directly representing you and your hard work to paying customers. With new employees, you must ensure they are personable both on the phone and through written text and have a solid understanding of what you do and where your company stands on various issues. Someone now must watch over them to ensure quality is up to par. That’s a significant chunk of time down the drain, especially when you consider the learning curve involved with a bunch of new employees all at once.
Should Startups In-house Customer Support
We understand the internal dilemma—there was a trend for a while to outsource to offshore teams, sometimes succeeding magnificently and sometimes leading to disastrous results. If you plan on using an Artificial Intelligence team or a team that uses pre-written response paragraphs because English isn’t their first language, you’re bound to run into trouble at some point. Also, it can be difficult with many third-party teams to monitor quality consistently. Cultural barriers pop up if the hired group resides in a foreign country, leading to privacy concerns and a lack of communication and collaboration. Beyond those basic downfalls, knowledge about the company is often basic to none.
Many of those groups work only to comply with the most basic ground rules of minimally answering to consumers, not engaging or encouraging more purchases, or relating the purpose of the company itself. This is where, happily, outsourcing has changed significantly in the last several years. Now, with U.S. based, native speaking teams in competition to wow the companies they work for, the whole game is being approached differently to suit (guess who?), you.
Should you Outsource Customer Support
Outsourced companies like Support Llama spend time getting to know your business. They provide cost effective customer support solutions for startups. For example, we have a five-day on-boarding process in an attempt to distinguish your startup’s genuine voice and brand while simultaneously getting a feel for the products and how you, the owner, would respond to consumers. The goal with this is to be indistinguishable from you and—lucky for you if it seems like this will take forever—we already have systems set in place and the staff to do it. Imagine how much time it would take, in addition to general training concerning quality assurance (remember, you’d also have to create written standards), to equip new employees to imitate your preferred voice and tone so it always sounds like customers are conversing with someone in charge who knows the business inside and out. We don’t know long it would take exactly, but we assume it takes a while.
Free Time
Once the training duration is shortened and passed off to someone else, it also frees up time for everyone with a key role, including when the months start passing. Even with a solid start in taking care of customers, as you grow, you have to ramp it up, scale it to your production level. This is where initially effective solutions often turn sour. Sure, it was easy to respond to those ten and then fifty emails a day in the early weeks. Everyone took a turn and it didn’t take too long. Now that you have thousands of complaints, questions and feedback coming in, it’s a little difficult to just split it equally. Then, as we mentioned before, who even has time to train an entirely new set of employees just to make sure they understand how your unique business should run?
Your Distinct Voice
Even successful startups don’t always have an established voice or brand when they start—they’re still figuring it out, working out the kinks and seeing who’s interested. Good customer service for startups means the support team aiding in that venture. It’s a set of outside eyes and ears, taking in all the information, examining what exists so far, and helping set guidelines for solid expectations. Of course, they don’t do this without you and your guidance! Breathe easy. Everything is about collaborating to ensure success on both sides.
Improved Performance
Ideally with outside help, performance improves. You’re focused on what you should be focused on: your business! We focus on ensuring your customers return to purchase again and again. Outsourcing customer service for startups means concrete, favorable first impressions on purchasers from the outset. This potentially means easily multiplying the customer base, because no one is leaving angry, and the satisfied buyers are spreading the word that not only are they happy with your products, but also your customer service is knowledgeable and super helpful.
We appreciate these kinds of wins. Really, it’s what we live for, and we’re doing it 24/7. Yes, not only do you not wake up to seven-hundred new e-mails after your good night’s rest, but your customer base was being taken care of while you were sleeping. Building up your foundation of returning customers while you snooze… can anyone say that’s not ideal?
Decisions Made
New enterprises come with a lot of decisions. In terms of customer service solutions for startups, this means organizing workers, designating jobs, analyzing production and finding an effective route to help customers, all while also discovering the right platforms and technology for your requirements.
Want one less hard decision where you spend hours wasting time looking into platforms while considering the training lag that you just know is about to happen? Perfect, that’s our preference too. Outsourcing immediately means you never waste time dealing with that. You have substantial support right from the get-go. Nothing is being delayed because one of your key department heads is busy training new recruits in something he’s not even officially trained to do.
Overall Cost Reduction to Provide Customer Support for your Startup
If you search the web, you’ll find that the number one reason for outsourcing customer service for startups is cost reduction. All of these other factors add up to reduced overall cost as business grows. No time or money is lost in the panic of having to upscale the week before Black Friday. You can stay calm with the reassurance that everything is taken care of, and that if you have any questions you’re free to talk to your live support group whenever.
In The End
As we said before, there are always various customer service solutions for startups. We realize that each brand, production goal, set of people, and circumstances are unique. In the end, you do you. We at Support Llama are just here to let you know that outsourcing can make life easier—while cutting costs and giving you more time to do your actual job. If you are interested in customer service solutions for startups you can see the pricing here.
