Last Updated on March 26, 2021 by David
The origins of customer support always seem to be an organic one. As soon as you bring a product to market, the need for customer support becomes an essential part of doing business. The inherent nature of this phenomenon means that you have a customer support operation no matter what type of business you are. Therefore, you either don’t have a problem now but will in the future or you have a problem now but it hasn’t manifested itself enough for you to notice.
Misgauging the pressure on your customer support team as your business scales is often the root of future problems. When you’re just starting out, it might be counter intuitive to see how your investments in customer support can be inversely proportional to how fast your business is growing. For example, the public beta period for a technology startup, where the user base is growing but product and revenue growth remains relatively flat for a short amount of time, is actually the most crucial time to focus on getting customer support right.
Depending on the type of business, the risk of developing chronic customer support problems originates from in between the two ends of this spectrum:
- Focusing too much on other areas of a business and neglecting the importance of customer support (questions, concerns, feedback, etc.)
- Focusing too much on customer support by over-anticipating the growth of a business and weighing it down.
Before starting our company, we worked at other startups where failure to address the above forms of risk led to complications that were much harder address later on.
Startup A delivered an innovative point-of-sale e-commerce platform for merchants. Because e-commerce fluctuates seasonally, Startup A added new support processes and agents constantly in “preparation” for spikes in traffic and support requests. The original team, composed of two dedicated support agents, quickly grew to a team of more than 10 in less than half a year. The excessive emphasis on customer support, which should be given credit, resulted in the over-complication of tools and processes which were unfit for a startup.
Startup B delivered online communities for buying and selling used goods. The majority of time spent at startup B was focused on delivering a better and more secure shopping experience. Investments into finding a suitable tool and building a process around supporting customers were marginal. Support staff relied on hacked together tools from bug trackers and project management apps. The website and product reflected this mentality by making it difficult for customers to contact support. This over emphasis on building the best product detracted the ability for startup B to adapt to the needs of its customers.
The answer to whether or not you have a problem with customer support cannot be simply a yes or a no. Start to think about your position as a balance between the two poles. Seeing and feeling the pull from either pole will help shape an approach to building a well-functioning customer support atmosphere.