Challenges startups face delivering good customer service

It is gratifying to see your startup grow. But a thriving business can pull your attention in many different directions—and sometimes, that means customer service gets overlooked. Many business owners focus their attention on products and marketing plans, hoping to achieve success by attracting new customers. Less often do they consider how to retain customers once acquired.

It has been established that it is more economical to retain existing customers than to acquire new ones. Statistics indicate that existing customers are more likely to try your new products and spend more money. Despite this, statistics also show that companies are more likely to invest in customer acquisition than retention.

Here's why this might be the case:

New customers look good on paper

Many metrics tracked by companies are merely "vanity metrics." They create an illusion that marketing efforts are paying off so businesses can demonstrate their success to stakeholders. For example, a business may track the total number of customers acquired, when they should be tracking the cost of each acquisition. They may track monthly revenue per customer, when they should be looking at customer lifetime value. Too many companies sacrifice actionable metrics in favor of numbers that boost their self-image.

New customers provide early gratification

New companies often seek quick victories to stay relevant in the market, and they know acquiring customers boosts short term revenue. Unfortunately, sometimes it's too late before they realize the importance of customer lifetime value, which is relative to customer retention. For these companies, closing two new deals feels like an achievement—even if five customers drop.

Over time, companies with this mindset will find it increasingly difficult to stay in business. Customer lifetime value plays a major role in long-term success, which means providing a high-quality customer experience is crucial.

Now let this sink in, 86% of customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. That shows how hard good customer service is to come by these days. Though an acquisition-driven growth strategy is not necessarily a bad thing, it's important to ensure that you're providing a top-notch experience to customers once they're acquired. This is how customers become your brand evangelists.

It's important that you keep up with increasing customer requests as your business grows. Remember, it only takes one bad experience for a customer to turn to one of your rivals. But providing quality customer support can be challenging for small businesses, especially since the responsibility of handling customer requests usually falls on a small team, or even a single person. Even when the company has the means to hire more support agents, these teams often lack the right tools to succeed. There's only so much email can contribute to a good customer experience.

Customer service cannot be provided exclusively by email.

As a customer support tool, email can be slow, cluttered, and typically lacking in advanced features. Your customers are emotional beings, so to provide an excellent customer experience, you at least need to be able to understand their feelings.  That's not something you can accomplish with email.

Here are some telltale signs your business has outgrown email inbox as a tool for customer support:

• Your inbox is full of customer emails, and the backlog of requests is causing delayed response times.
• You struggle to identify urgent customer requests.
• You sometimes overlook requests that haven't been answered, or respond to those that have already been answered.
• You often lose track of email threads and find it difficult to follow case history.
• Your email inbox can't manage requests from other channels, such as social platforms or your business website.
• You find it difficult to derive insights or track important metrics from customer interactions.

So what's the solution?

Today, successful businesses are transitioning their support services from email to customer service software. Sophisticated customer service software is purpose-built, feature-rich, and geared at simplifying the support process for both agents and customers. With the right software, you can create tickets from requests received through any channel. A ticket is a complete record of a customer request that documents every interaction between the customer and agent. There are many customer service software options available, which should make it easy to find one that suits your company's needs.

Sounds like a deal? Unfortunately, that's not always the case for small businesses.

Why are most customer service solutions in the market today not ideal for small businesses?

Many software solutions come with high price tags, and an abundance of advanced features that simply aren't useful to small businesses. The ones that open up their starting plans for small businesses, lure customers with seemingly low price but hide the most essential functionalities in higher plans. A growing business needs access to basic features, with the option to upgrade plans as its customer base expands. But the popularity of "bait and switch" subscription plans often makes this impossible. These plans require businesses to purchase additional functionalities as expensive add-ons, on top of already loft subscription prices.

For a young business that has settled on an option after intense research, onboarding should not feel like a business challenge, but a solution. For vendors, emphasis should be on empathizing with every business size rather than chasing only the "big wins".

Can Zoho help?  

Absolutely! If email is your comfort zone, that's okay. Transitioning to ticketing software should not be stressful or painfully expensive. The Express edition of Zoho Desk is easy to implement, simple to use, and affordable. That's why it's an ideal customer support platform for small businesses!

Learn more about why Zoho Desk is the best help desk software for small businesses.