How Startups Can Excel at Customer Service on a Budget

Customer service is the number one thing that any business should be investing in to ensure success. 

If you want to ensure sustainable revenue and help your business grow, you need loyal customers who stand by your organization. The only way to cultivate loyalty is with amazing service. 

In fact, 69% of people would recommend a company offering great service to others. 

The biggest challenge for start-ups is usually finding the required budget to handle the cost of constantly delighting customers. 

If your business is still relatively small, you might not have as many resources at your disposal as a larger company to spend on keeping clients happy. 

However, that doesn’t mean you can’t excel at customer service. 

Today we’re going to be looking at some of the ways you can excel at customer service, without stretching your budget too thin. 

Don’t Invest In Unnecessary Custom Technology

In today’s era of digital transformation, there are tools to help with almost every aspect of running your business. 

Investing in the right software will help you track the customer journey from start to finish, offer the kind of experiences clients are looking for, and consistently optimize your strategy. 

You can start with something simple, like a Customer Relationship Management tool. 

These solutions allow businesses to track important information about individual clients and customer segments. 

The information in your CRM can then help with creating personalized marketing campaigns, and ensuring clients always speak to the same agent (or one who is equally informed) when contacting you. 

Also, consider investing in intelligent tools that will automatically route customer calls to the correct agent based on their knowledge or previous interactions with the client. 

Optimize Your Customer Service Team

To offer the ideal service to your target customer, you need the right team of dedicated professionals. 

Startup companies often go through periods where their levels of demand can go up and down drastically. 

Optimizing your team won’t always mean bringing new members of staff on board.

Although in-house customer service employees can be an excellent investment, it’s also useful to look into other options, like freelancers and contractors. 

These outsourced professionals can work from anywhere in the world and give your business extra support when demand increases. 

The great thing about freelancers and contractors is that you only need to pay for them as long as you need them. 

You can save serious cash on finding and hiring new staff by using contractors.

Moreover, if you need extra help, you can always look into things like chatbots and automated systems to help your contractors sort through more repetitive questions. 

Listen to Your Customers’ Feedback

Your customers can often give you a lot of valuable information about how to improve your service strategy—as long as you’re willing to listen. 

Reviews and feedback from your audience are an excellent way to determine where you need to make changes to impress your audience. 

Don’t just sweep negative feedback under the rug, pay attention to what customers ask you to change.

If you respond to every review, you can (positive or negative), and show your customers that you’re taking steps to make your business the best it can be, they’ll reward you with loyalty. 

Give your customers multiple ways to have their say by listing your website on review sites, using satisfaction surveys, or listening for brand mentions on social media. 

Here’s a great example from Nike.

When you update your business based on the feedback your audience gives, you should create press releases, blogs, and updates to let them know that you’ve taken their feedback into account. 

Your clients will be far more invested in a business that seems to take their requests seriously. 

Reward Loyal Customers

As wonderful as it is to find and onboard new clients, your loyal customers are in fact some of the most valuable people in your community. 

Studies show that repeat clients tend to spend up to 67% more than new customers. 

These people are also more likely to recommend your business to other customers and help your startup gain more attention. 

Reward your loyal customers by creating programs where they can earn points for every purchase or referral they make, like Helpscout did in the example below.

This will convince your happy clients to keep coming back and interacting with your business as often as you can. It could also help you to encourage things like word-of-mouth referrals, which often lead to more valuable customers. 

You can also reward loyal customers in other ways, such as giving them exclusive early access to sales, or providing them with discounts and gifts on their birthday. 

Help Customers Help Themselves

It’s much easier to handle customer queries and requests if your clients can handle some of their issues on their own. 

You can invest in chatbots and FAQ pages to provide customers with advice on how to handle common problems. 

It’s also worth creating plenty of how-to guides, articles, videos, and other content whenever you can, like in the example below.

Helping your customers to understand your product or service with the right content will reduce the strain on your customer service team.

At the same time, doing so will ensure that customers have more options for how they’re going to interact with your brand. 

At the same time, content creation gives you an excellent way to showcase your brand leadership and knowledge. 

The more content you create, the more you can begin to leverage other benefits, like higher ranking on search engine pages and backlinks from leading companies. 

Use the feedback you get from your customers for help figuring out which topics you should be creating content for. 

Perfect Your Onboarding Strategy

Finally, a lot of companies, particularly time-strapped startups, make the mistake of forgetting about their customer after they’ve completed a purchase. 

However, you’ll be far more likely to end up with happy clients if you plan an effective onboarding strategy to introduce your new clients to your service or product. 

A polished customer onboarding strategy is a quick and effective way to show your audience everything they need to know about whatever they’re buying from you. 

User onboarding should include videos and demonstrations, question and answer sessions with specialists, and even personalized set-up and guidance for each individual customer. 

Onboarding strategies inform your audience, so they can discover the best features of your product as quickly as possible. 

The right strategy will also improve your customer’s chance of generating the right results with your offering, so they’ll be more likely to keep buying from you in the future. 

On top of all that, onboarding reduces the strain on your customer service team by answering questions early. 

You Can Deliver Great Service on a Budget

Walking the line between building a memorable brand and keeping track of your budget can be difficult as a budding startup. 

Fortunately, companies don’t have to spend a fortune to generate great results when it comes to customer service. 

With the tips above, you can start building a plan to delight and impress your audience, without having to worry about blowing your budget. 

Remember, don’t be afraid to update and improve your customer service strategy as your business evolves. 

As your company continues to learn more about its target audience, you may be able to enhance your customer service plan even further.