Customer Support for Software Startups
Yesterday I posted about the need for great quality assurance in software development. Closely correlated to that is the need for great customer support.
Ben Chestnut of MailChimp posted a masterful piece on customer support that turns funnels on their head. His point is that you can do a lot with great customer support. You can even replace a huge chunk of your intrusive sales efforts by providing awesome customer support.
The need for customer support is self-evident and intuitive, so I don’t really need to explain why it is great. But it’s surprising how so many companies fail to provide great customer support. So few measure their customer support metrics.
Here are some ideas for great customer support:
- Use technology to track customer support issues all the way from customer report, through the engineering process, to a final resolution. Enable the ticket to email the customer any time it is updated. Provide all employees with access to the ticketing system. We like JIRA.
- Use public customer forums (like our ArrayFire forums which leverage PhpBB). Use plugins to eliminate spam. Respond to forum posts as soon as they come online.
- Don’t answer customer emails directly. Rather take the essence of the question, post it on your forums (without posting any sensitive information) and answer it there. It becomes indexed in Google. It helps foster your forum community. It helps answer questions for subsequent users. Send the customer a link to the forum post and encourage them to join the online conversation.
- Follow-up with customers within an hour of their notification.
- Get on the phone. People love to talk to you!
Staying close to customers in support is the best product management intelligence gathering your organization can do. Everyone in the organization should do some customer support.
How does your software startup offer great customer support?