After surveying more than 4.000 startups, Zendesk discovered what high-growth startups do compared to stagnant ones in customer experience.
Do you want to learn more about growth and customer experience as a startup? You came to the right place.
In this blog, you are going to find out how customer experience is driving growth for startups. It emphasizes the need for startups to invest in customer experience to promote long-term retention, establish brand trust and reshape product roadmaps.
Considering the increasing cost of customer acquisition and the declining willingness to pay, making a great customer experience today is even more crucial. Despite this, many startups lack a formal customer experience strategy. We want to provide six tips to help startups improve their customer experience and drive growth.
Startups should not rely solely on email communication. Instead, they should use a professional platform to communicate with their clients and customers. This platform could be a messaging app, a chatbot, or customer service software.
The idea is to have a more efficient and organized way of communicating with clients and customers rather than getting lost in a cluttered inbox. Entrepreneurs and startups can also track their communication history using a professional platform and better understand their clients' needs and preferences.
Customer experience platforms like Zendesk and its competitors offer a range of features that can help startups improve their customer interactions. Some of these features include:
These platforms allow startups to integrate multiple communication channels, such as email, chat, social media, and phone, into a single dashboard. This ensures that customers can reach out through their preferred channel, and startups can respond efficiently.
Customer experience platforms provide a ticketing system that helps organize and track customer inquiries and issues. Startups can assign tickets to specific team members, set priorities, and track the status of each ticket to ensure timely resolution.
These platforms allow startups to create a knowledge base or self-service portal where customers can find answers to common questions or troubleshoot issues independently. This reduces the need for repetitive support requests and empowers customers to find solutions independently.
Customer experience platforms offer automation and workflow management capabilities to streamline support processes. Startups can automate repetitive tasks, set up ticket routing and escalation workflows, and create rules for efficient customer support operations.
These platforms provide reporting and analytics features that allow startups to track and measure key customer service metrics. Startups can gain insights into customer satisfaction, response times, ticket volumes, and other performance indicators to identify areas for improvement.
Customer experience platforms offer integrations with various third-party tools and applications. Startups can integrate their customer experience platform with CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, analytics tools, and more to enhance customer interactions and provide a seamless experience.
Make it easy for their clients and customers to reach them by offering multiple communication channels. They should also be aware of their clients' preferred channels and double down on those channels.
After you have added a professional platform, go omnichannel. Give them all the channels you can have and let them decide the market and the customer. What they want more and double down on that. Live channels are mostly chat and telephone, right? It depends also if you see the general numbers. Of course, this tip number three gives the live opportunity for the customer to interact with you. But that understanding even goes further and understanding what your profile of the customer is.
Offer your clients or prospects a live chat or telephone support. This allows them to talk to a natural person and get their questions answered quickly.
Are you talking about a customer from the younger and older generations? Older generations usually need help to use the chat. Very hard for them to use frequently asked questions or use social media. Usually, they just want to grab the phone and call somebody.
Younger generations, instead, grew up with the Internet, are used to chatting, and sometimes don't want to talk to someone. So allow live interaction and double down depending on the demographics you serve.
Think of the frequently asked questions of your customers. Be proactive. A good entrepreneur identifies patterns, writes standards, and enjoys and gets these opportunities from the standards. See the standard, the patterns, and the repeated questions. This will also help not only with customer success but with the articles on your blogs, and the content will also help you with marketing.
Help customers help themselves. The frequently asked questions for your blog will generate more traffic for your site.
Integrations increase productivity, streamlining workflows. Integrations are important because they allow you to increase dramatically your productivity. Zendesk has over 1.000 integrations with software platforms for daily workflow at organizations, such as Slack and Monday.
Thus, you can integrate, for example, your CMR with your customer support platform, reducing friction and accelerating the velocity of your tasks.
Be relentless about driving down your first reply and resolution time. Aim for three hours first reply and maximum of eight hours for resolutions. Think about when you were a child in the nineties and rented a movie. You would have to get a car or a bus and go to the store, go back, get traffic, watch the movie, and return the movie back after 24 hours.
Today, if you want to watch a movie, click play streaming. Play very quickly. See the difference very clearly. This is a tiny example of how markets are becoming insanely faster daily.
If you are not fast enough, especially in the digital era where they are comparing you very quickly in the point of their fingers with other solutions and other products, customers will change you for your competitor or they find another solution.
Speed is still one of the things that is very relevant. And the companies responding faster and resolving client's questions, and doubts are growing more because they were retaining and having a better customer experience than the others.
Summarizing the six tips, remember that to grow through customer service, you should: go live, be accessible to your customers (which means going omnichannel), identify your demographics, create content, make integrations if necessary, and strive for speed.
