One of the smartest entrepreneurial writers out there, Jonathan Fields, recently wrote about the difference between building a startup or a business. One can lead to another, he says, but they’re very different. One focuses on hustle, innovation, something-from-nothing, and doing everything from scratch. The other involves tweaking, perfecting, and building processes. They both product similar but different results, and most people love one or another.

It’s a good distinction for those thinking of starting a company to make. However, I want to call out something I think is important: whether you’re building a startup or a business, customer service is key.

If you’re building a startup, it’s about moving quickly and trying to attract customers any way you can. You’re trying to sell people on the concept more than a finished product. Your product is probably half-baked and buggy. That’s just the way it’s going to be if you’re moving that fast…which is why you have to make sure to listen to & serve those customers. This doesn’t mean fixing everything: you don’t have time for that! But if your app breaks left and right, you at least need to awknowlege that you hear your customers' complaints. If they’re telling you that they need feature X, you need to hear them so you can iterate and keep them using your product. Alienate the few customers you have and you’ll never get off the ground.

If you're building a business, you probably have a far more stable product. It looks good, it works consistently. You are not starving for users. Who cares if you don’t answer their emails right away? Well, actually, they care. They care a lot. Along with this more stable product and bigger audience comes a level of expectation. You need to respond to and act on issues quickly, or your name will be plastered all over Twitter with the hashtag #fail. You may not need to innovate as quickly as a startup, but you need to provide service twice as fast.

Fields ends his article with this suggestion:

“As you think about your entrepreneurial future, especially if you’re in the early stages or about to dive in, take the time to reflect on what part of the process lights you up. What empties you out.”

If you’re not “lit up” by serving customers, find someone who is. Find them early. Let them plan to scale your customer service as you grow. Give them to freedom to delight your customers and you’ll succeed, whether you’re a business or a startup.

Photo courtesy of scrappy.

We all try to do our best. But humans tend to be overly optimistic about what they can actually accomplish. You say you’ll go to bed early, but you find yourself still up watching Kitchen Nightmares at 12:35am. You say you’ll respond to customers within 24 hours, but instead it’s 31 hours. It’s not your fault – you got stuck in a meeting, had to run an errand, or had some very time-intensive other emails to answer first.

That’s a problem, though. According to a new study, failing to respond to a customer within the time period you promised will hurt their satisfaction far more than simply making a less ambitious promise!

The smart folks over at the Corporate Executive Board did a study wherein they tested three groups: two that delivered on their 24- and 48-hour respective promises, and one that failed to respond within their promised time. The results are below (CSAT is fancy-business-speak for Customer Satisfaction).

Changing their promise from a 24-hour response time to 48-hours only decreased customer satisfaction by 13% – as long as they responded in time. Failing to respond in the advertised time period decreased satisfaction by almost 50%!

You can also see that overpromising results in the customer spending more effort to get help…as they may have to email you again asking you to answer their original query, or go elsewhere for an answer.

Warning: DO NOT take this as an excuse to be lazy about response times. We've already proved that faster responses make customers happier. Strive for your fastest – advertise your most consistent.

Zappos is, of course, the prime (if perhaps overplayed) example of this. They never promise free overnight shipping, but they end up giving it to many people. At this point they probably could promise overnight shipping and it would be true 90% of the time. But by making it an unexpected surprise, the 90% of customers who get this surprise upgrade become ecstatic evangelists…rather than having 10% of customers be let down and grumpy.

This is probably the easiest advice you’ll ever get from this blog. Go look at how fast you respond to customers. Change your promised response period to match the response time you consistently hit (here’s how to change your autoresponse in UserVoice, if you’re a customer). Boom. You just made your customers happier.

(Now go work on improving your response time!)

This is part of our ongoing series on Scaling Customer Service, based on our Customer Service Scaling Timeline. This month we're covering Stage 6.

When your company is small, it’s easy to improvise to delight your customers. You know most of them. You remember them. And you know each member of your customer service team well (and could probably hit them with a paper airplane from where you’re sitting). Joe from Company X wants a discount? Sure. Fred from Company Y is going to be in town? Have him come by for a beer!

But once your company gets large, this is a much bigger challenge. You don’t necessarily know the Freds and Joes. You don’t even know all your customer service agents, and they may know you as a boss, not as a person. You’ve put customer service training & guidelines in place to ensure quality. But how do you ensure that you’re creating customer delight?

If you’re hiring the right, empathetic people, they already know how to delight customers. At a large company, the challenge is letting them know that they can. As one of many, your reps may feel expendable and reluctant stick their necks out. They might see an opportunity to delight a customer, but if it costs a little money or doesn’t fall into any of the guidelines they’ve been given, they’ll pass it by.

The solution? You need to empower your employees to go outside of the box to make customers happy.

How do you ensure this happens? Emphasize, repeat, and celebrate. You should certainly tell your staff that they can take liberties with pleasing customers. But to convince them, you’re going to need to keep repeating this and celebrate employees who take this extra step. You have to build this into your culture, not just a memo.

Zappos celebrates their 8-hour phone calls, sending flowers to mourning customers, and speaking in the 3rd person. Sure, part of celebrating this is for the press. But it’s just as much for the employees, so they really know that they can spend those 8 hours on the phones if they think it’s the right thing to do.

(Before you freak out about 8 hours on the phone, remember that every culture is different. You set the guide rails for your team so they know what’s reasonable. Even 30 minutes on the phone might be delightful for your customers.)

If you’re really ready to embrace some risk and try to delight your customers, you need to dive in headfirst. Improvisation requires freedom, and the sooner you build a culture that supports it, the sooner you’ll start getting reviews like this one.

Rule photo courtesy of Me & the Sysop.

This is part of our ongoing series on Scaling Customer Service, based on our Customer Service Scaling Timeline. This month we're covering Stage 6.

More than a year ago we wrote about how we feel that customer-powered support doesn’t work. We were a little overzealous with our title; even in that post, we mention that customer-powered support can be useful for some organizations.

When you reach a certain customer base size, scaling a regular support organization can become difficult to impossible. This is especially true with free services which have many casual users (Google, Facebook, etc). If you’re on the road to becoming one of these organizations, it’s time to examine how you can provide better customer service by getting your customers involved.

How do customer-powered support communities work?

In addition to traditional support features such as knowledge bases and ticketing software, you have one or more forums where your most passionate and helpful customers can help other customers.

How do you know that it’s time for a customer-powered support solution?

• Your userbase is extremely large (as only a small percentage of them will help each other).
• You’ve followed the progression of the customer service scaling timeline, but you still can’t keep up with customer requests without outsourcing.
• You have a very passionate, involved userbase.
• Your product changes are slow or very well-documented, so your customer-powered support community won't be thrown off.
• You have the resources to devote to making this community a success (it’s not as simple as it seems).

If you don’t have a passionate customer base, this will all fall apart.

Put your ego away for a moment and think about this. Do your customers already help each other out? Create content for your company without you asking? Post how-to videos for your product on YouTube? If these folks aren’t already passionate enough to contribute to a forum, you won’t be able to force them. It’s ok if your customers aren’t like this. Many won’t be (especially in B2B companies). Just don’t try to force them to be.

The frequent contributors to your forum are doing you a huge favor, and you really, really can’t take this for granted.

Reward them with titles, special insights into new launches (which will also help them do great support), swag, etc. Google recently spoke at Social Media Week about how they keep extremely close contact with their Top Contributors, even going so far as to fly them out to California for a thank-you event at the Googleplex. That’s worth more than money to people who love your business.

This is NOT an excuse to stop doing good support.

The best customer-powered support communities are supplemented by other support materials and channels. They’re also constantly monitored, improved, and iterated upon. This is not something you can turn on and leave. In some ways, it requires much harder work than regular support (just fewer employees). If you throw up a forum and ignore it, you’ll spend less on customer service…but you’ll generate a lot of furious, frustrated customers.

Is your company ready for customer-powered support? Don’t just dive in – there’s a lot of opportunity for failure. Try the more established tactics from our timeline before you make this major move.

Sign photo courtesy of funky_abstract.
Volunteer photo courtesy of rkeefer.

This is part of our ongoing series on Scaling Customer Service, based on our Customer Service Scaling Timeline. This month we're covering Stage 6.

We’ve discussed training your first customer service representative. But soon your team will grow, you’ll start to have account managers (salespeople) interact with your customers, and you'll stop being personally involved in training. How do you ensure that everyone is getting quality training, even as your team grows out of your personal grasp?

I spoke to Maya Grinberg and Hannah Meiton from Wildfire Interactive, makers of a variety of social marketing tools. As their company has grown, they’ve implemented a number of practices around training.

Mock Campaigns
New hires at Wildfire go over mock campaigns, customized for their role, to understand how they should react in many common circumstances. Wildfire has found this to be a great way to jumpstart their confidence in what would normally be unexpected situations.

Manuals
Along with their mock campaign training, employees get a manual of issues and a combo of optional and rigid responses to certain scenarios.

Shadowing
New customer service and account management hires at Wildfire spend several weeks shadowing existing employees. “We know that our existing employees provide great customer service,” says Maya. “So learning from them is the perfect way to get new employees on the right page.”

Open Floor Plan
The simplest way to collaborate and ensure group quality? Put everyone in a room together. Hannah: “Proximity helps us share tips, frustrations, and reminders about quality. We also like each other a lot so we want to be close.”

Got your first few hires? It might be time to start outlining your training plan for the future.

Photo courtesy of Daniele Muscetta.

This is part of our ongoing series on Scaling Customer Service, based on our Customer Service Scaling Timeline.

Whew, you’ve finally made it to the final stage of our timeline. You’re a huge enterprise company with many customers and staggering amounts of revenue. So, you’re done, right? Of course not.

As you move into Stage 6, the infrastructure we put in place previously is going to help you immensely. But you also have a lot less control over individual interactions. You’ve got a huge team and a huge customer base who are doing so many things that you can’t hope to read them all in the day. It’s time to ensure that you are building a culture that will turn this into positive results, not a mess of bad, inconsistent support.

Some things you’ll want to think about in this phase:

1. A customer-powered support community. Although we feel this doesn’t work for 99% of companies, you’re now at the size where you may need to guide your community to help each other in order to keep up with the size of you’re customer base.
2. Ensure that you’re building an internal culture of quality support, because you can no longer control it all.
3. Investigate pre-written scenarios for new hires, to give them the right approach – both specific to that scenario and in general – to helping customers.
4. Do not let your standards slip. Yes, there’s a lot going on…but if you can’t answer customers at the same rate you did in Stages 1-5, they’re going to be disappointed and start looking elsewhere.

Stick with us as we take the dive into the final stage of our timeline!

This is part of our ongoing series on Scaling Customer Service, based on our Customer Service Scaling Timeline. This month we're covering Stage 5.

We’ve all had this experience. You call the support number for a big corporation…maybe a bank, a cable company, or a phone company. You wade through some robo-menus, and then finally speak to a human. And they totally fail to help. They suggest obvious solutions, seem to actually be less technically competent than you, and spend a lot of time “checking your records” and looking things up.

These people aren’t trying to be irritating. They just know too little about too much.

Products can be complicated. It’s understandable that one person won’t be able to know everything about a single product. Most customer service reps develop generalized knowledge so they can help the largest number of customers. But why do we continue to bump people between generalists when certain issues clearly require specialization? We don’t hire generic developers to build our data centers, or nurse practitioners to treat cancer. Why do we think customer service is different?

Once your baseline team is built (hopefully by the end of Stage Three of our timeline), it’s time to focus. What areas of your product generate the most confusion? What areas require the most investigation by your reps? While there are always product improvements you can make, some areas are just going to generate questions and confusion no matter what (for us it’s Single Sign-On). A great way to track this is by marking product area in all tickets with something like UserVoice Helpdesk's custom fields.

Once you’ve found your problem area, create a dedicated position that is primarily focused on this area. Send all customer messages about this issue directly to this employee. Your regular customer service reps won’t have to spend their time digging into something they don’t know a lot about. And your customers with these issues will get quicker and definitive answers.

An added benefit for you is the low ramp-up time for specialists. Give them a brief overview of the whole product, do a deep dive into their area, and get them to work. Especially in times of huge growth, this is a more sustainable way to scale.

Specialists getting bored? Many companies solve this by simply rotating representatives into the specialist role. In the case of the low ramp-up time, this is a great way to eventually expand the knowledge of these specialists.

A specialist isn’t going to solve all your problems, nor should you stop trying to make that area of the product better. But having someone who can quickly and accurately answer the questions that take up the most time will thrill your customers and save your regular support reps a lot of money on painkillers. 

Painkiller photo courtesy of pinprick.