Article • 13 min read
Founders are leaning in to service when launching customer-focused startups
Customer feedback is key to launching a customer-focused startup – but with data all over the place, where should you begin?
作者: Staff Writer Mark Smith
上次更新日期: January 3, 2022
You’ve spent hours upon hours coding in your apartment, in cafes, even while riding public transit. Now comes the nerve-wracking part: your first customers are about to take your product for a spin. You know that you need a customer service team, but you’ve never built one before. Where do you begin?
For founders of startups, passion for the product comes naturally, but customer service? Not so much. So while it’s easy to obsess over every product feature, startup founders need to prioritize building relationships with their customers from day one.
Startups can get free Zendesk for 6 months
That said, cultivating a relationship with customers isn’t always top of mind for founders. Customer relationship technology is fast-changing – there’s a ton of thought, planning, and strategy that goes into the best customer experience. Hardest of all is making the commitment to listening to your customers. “Your product doesn’t yell at you. Your product is like a pet, mostly obedient and never complaining. Your customers are like your partner, though. They have expectations and feedback because you’re in a real relationship that may not always be easy,” says Mikkel Svane, Zendesk CEO. “You have to be vulnerable with your customers.”
This is tough. In the earliest stages of your startup, you will have fewer resources and processes in place. Customer support is an all-hands-on-deck affair for your team, and everyone in the organization, no matter how small, will probably find themselves pitching in. All of that being said, you don’t have to go about it alone. For founders and small startups, there already exists a plethora of intuitive tech to help you get started at growing a customer-focused company. Don’t get scared off by software trials and integrations – it’s easier than you think. Here are four crucial steps for laying the groundwork for your future customer service team.
“Your product doesn’t yell at you. Your product is like a pet, mostly obedient and never complaining. Your customers are like your partner, though. They have expectations and feedback.”
Mikkel Svane
1. Talk to every customer
As the face of the company, the founder should be personally available to early customers. Give customers your email address and respond in a timely fashion. Model this behavior in front of your team, however small or large.
Customer focus: Which questions should I ask?
There’s no single question that best serves all companies. SurveyMonkey, however, identified five categories of questions, including:
What can my company do to better serve your needs?
How satisfied are you with our products/services?
What value do we provide?
What are your biggest challenges?
For founders and startups, these questions might even be more granular: How do customers like the branding? How is our pricing, packaging, and our customer support? How would you rate the support you received?
2. Learn what makes customers happy—and what makes them angry
Take in customer feedback anywhere it comes – whether that’s social media, your inbox, or a punchy slack message. Your customers will have a lot to teach you. Dig into the details to find meaningful insights, and don’t ignore them because they tell a story you don’t want to hear, or because they’re hard. In building our a relationship with your customers, it’s also important to know which questions to ask.
Customer focus: When should I ask questions?
The best time to gather customer feedback is always – with a bit of strategy. Popping into your customers’ inbox on weekends, out of regular business hours, and apropos of nothing, is a bad idea if you want your questions to be impactful.
- When reaching out individually: Early on, founders being accessible to their customers on a personal basis can help build trust and brand identity. To maintain this ongoing customer relationship, listen to what creates value for your customer. As Jerry Jao says in Inc, “most brand communications are based on broad assumptions instead of actual consumer behavior.” By treating customers like human beings – and by acting like a human – the act of reaching out with questions directly impacts your product health.
- When sending customer surveys: Maximizing survey response rate involves being mindful of time. Some of our own data suggests surveys get high responses when they’re not lost among other work emails. “The prime time to send a survey would be Mondays at 4:00 AM when there’s little opportunity for the email to go unnoticed.”
- When measuring CSAT (customer satisfaction): Predicting customer statisfaction helps prevent churn. If you’re managing customer conversations with software, you can often automatically send CSAT surveys 24 hours after closing a ticket. CSAT can also be garnered from web pages, in knowledge base articles, or in conversations on messaging channels.
- When creating a Slack community: Many startups leverage tools like Slack and Discord to create customer communities. Slack is free to use, with different plans and pricing depending on your goals and the size of your organization. In the last decade, Slack has become emblematic of a certain type of company, according to the Atlantic. It encourages free expression, makes it possible to carry out work remotely, and stores its asynchronous threaded conversations so nothing gets lost. It’s a fantastic tool for relationship building in and outside the walls of your startup, and it can grow as much as you do.
3. Amplify the voice of your users
Voice of Customer best practices aren’t just for giant enterprise companies. Keeping the voice of your customer at the center of your organization is crucial in building up a customer-centric startup. For example, using CRM (customer relationship management) software like Zendesk for startups, which allows you to capture, triage, and iterate on customer data with live dashboards, shared inboxes, and heaps of industry-specific integrations, is a great way to start. Consider building a dedicated channel in Slack that broadcasts customer issues to all employees—it’s a great way to get product managers, engineers, and other employees directly involved in the support process while creating a community conversation involving your customers.
Customer focus: How to analyze feedback?
Customer feedback analysis for startups starts when any information is tracked and organized. There are numerous tools that startups can leverage to analyze customer data, including Google Analytics tracking on web pages to get insights from traffic, ads, and bounce rates. Startups using a CRM will have insight into customer conversations and tickets in real-time, visual dashboards, which can tell you a lot about the state of your business. These insights can relay information about the customer journey, support and satisfaction, and churn metrics.
It’s advisable to use some kind of visual dashboard or software to track and analyze customer feedback as opposed to keeping everything in spreadsheets. Messy spreadsheets make it harder than necessary to view and understand your customer data. There are many affordable – or free – customer relationship management tools available to startups. Most of which will save you time when looking at customer feedback while also integrating into your other business systems.
4. Base product iterations on customer feedback
When developing your product roadmap (and later, when you’re hashing out the product requirements), be sure to incorporate user feedback. Analyze how they’re using your product and embrace agile development so you can shift direction quickly without losing large amounts of development time.
No startup wants to cater to every customer’s whim, but by creating a customer-obsessed culture early on, you can be sure you’re developing in the right direction. “Startups need to think about support as a core company concept early on… One mistake that I’ve seen too often is that startups start thinking of support as an afterthought. One of your first hires should be on the support team,” says Jason Katz, a member support senior manager at Peloton.
“Startups need to think about support as a core concept early on… One of your first hires should be on the support team.”
Jason Katz, Peloton
The feedback is bad. What now?
It’s okay; put that feedback to use. Here’s how:
- Follow up with users who give you a negative rating or review. This is a great way to build trust with customers and retain their business.
- Analyze bad ratings or comments. Don’t overlook them in favor of the glowing reviews. Customers who are unhappy with your product or service are giving you actionable information—for free.
- Meet every week to discuss customer satisfaction outcomes. Set aside time for the team to analyze and review the negative feedback together and brainstorm ways to remedy the underlying causes.
- Group negative comments by cause—and look for trends. This will help you identify problem areas with your product, and also with your early support efforts or documentation.
So why is being vulnerable with your customers vital to your startup’s future? Simply because those conversations—as awkward and painful as some of them will be—generate invaluable feedback that will help you build a product that truly serves your customers’ needs.
