Customer service guide for startups

Making sense of it all

The first step is to figure out a system of labelling incoming feedback. Combine a description box with structured customised fields on your ticket form, giving your customers an easy way to self-tag their feedback (by product, for example). Ask your team members who respond to tickets to brainstorm about helpful fields, since they will naturally recognise some patterns on their own. Be sure to revisit your ticket fields periodically as customer issues are bound to change over time.

Fortunately, setting up customised fields is a doddle and their flexibility means they can be organised to gather specific information. Are your customers struggling with a clunky user interface, latency or billing issues? Customised fields will help you sort feedback into easy-to-navigate buckets and, in turn, enable you to direct tickets to the right people based on their expertise or experience.

This also opens the door to sending customers to your help centre, deflecting the ticket altogether. For example, you could set up a 'password reset' selection in a drop-down menu that, once selected, automatically generates instructions customers can use to resolve the issue on their own - avoiding the need for a ticket at all.

Share feedback with your internal team

As customer feedback comes into sharper focus, you’ll need to develop processes for sharing the data company wide. In the early days of startup mode this might not be a huge problem, but as your business grows you’re likely to encounter the dreaded silos.

Silos can be stubborn things, but your customer service software should enable you to bring transparency across departments through shared access to tickets and reports. One tactic to break down silos entails holding daily standup meetings - where customer feedback can be discussed among various team members, so responses can be prioritised.

However, while it’s important to have a tool in place that can help you share feedback across teams, no software in the world can replace human interaction. Consider appointing a liaison between your support and product (or finance, sales, etc.) teams to improve the flow of information.

And there is a clear benefit in having software engineers and product managers shadow your agents on customer support tickets - or, as some startups do, assign tickets to new staff so they understand common product issues. While it might be tempting to look at this exercise as taking away from valuable coding time, it will help product teams develop better use cases and roadmaps that reflect what your customers need.

Act on feedback

How many times have you seen a company put great effort into generating a report with real actionable insights, only to see that information discarded or ignored? Don’t make that mistake. Whether it's scheduling more training time for agents or having developers fix frustrating bugs that make your customers want to tear their hair out, your startup will earn loyalty by resolving the issues that matter to the people who use your product.

Ensuring that happens requires accountability - as the leader of your startup, make sure that this process becomes an integral part of company culture. Set up a process for following up on customer feedback and tie that to employee performance. Your customers will thank you.

Customers who are going out of their way to provide feedback should be top priority for your relationship building efforts. This extends far beyond solving immediate problems - it's about creating and nurturing an emotional connection with your customers so that they'll stick with your product, through thick and thin. While this encompasses the totality of the customer experience, pay special attention to getting employee buy-in.

One way to drive customer engagement is to tag tickets for good customer service ratings, watch for trends and then create an engagement strategy that pulls engaged users - 'advocates' - into research groups, beta tests and so on. These advocates can serve as your product’s greatest ambassadors, providing priceless word-of-mouth buzz that will attract new customers.

Close the loop with customers

So far so good - you’re actively gathering customer feedback, sharing it across teams and taking action based on what users have told you. Good going. But you haven't quite finished yet. Now it’s time to close the loop with those customers - tell them what you did, what you’re going to do or what didn’t make the cut. If your customers have taken the time to tell you about their experiences with your product, they’ll want to hear from you.

A great way to do this is to create an online community, where your product managers can share new product features and explain why certain requests have been postponed for future consideration. This can be an additional source of feedback and give customers a chance to weigh in on what your startup is working on - and it can take a bit of heat off your support team.

In the case of Wrike, the online community proved to be a great place to do this. “People noticed that we were implementing stuff that they were asking for,” Westbrook says. "Even on other threads they would say, 'I saw that you people did this, that's so awesome.'"

Here are a few additional ideas for how to communicate product changes:

• Direct conversations with customers (if feasible)

• Proactive outreach via email or in-product notifications

• Launch events or webinars to announce new features, bug fixes, etc.