Season 1 - Episode 7 : People Do Not Equal Customer Service
Some companies think that strong customer service means great people that a very polite and respond to requests quickly. Wrong. People do not equal (!=) customer service. To scale your business, you need to add customers without adding more people. And besides, if a customer needs to reach out to your customer service team, you've already let them down.
Background Story
I’m going to tell you right now: yes, your business needs a customer service team. We’d all love to have a business that doesn’t need to do customer support, but that’s a pipe-dream. That said, you don’t want to have a huge customer service team - you want to push your company to be more innovative in removing the need for customer service. This means a better product, better internal systems, and other strategies to reduce the burden of customer service.
This is a tricky balance. But ultimately we all know what annoying service looks like and you don’t want it. Chris and I take on how customer service ought to be structured.
Outline
Customer service is a product line
Adding customer service staff proportionally with revenue means your business doesn’t scale.
Improve your product to reduce customer service.
Busted Myth
Myth: Your business doesn’t need quality customer service
Secondary Myth: customers want to be delighted by customer service. Nope, they actually wish they weren’t talking to you. If they have to talk to you, they want their problem resolved quickly.
Learnings
Customer Service is a product line:
Customer service is the delicate balance between addressing customer service issues promptly and adhering to the strategic roadmap of product development. It’s the intersection of a bunch of major concerns: resource allocation dilemmas, efficient management of customer support teams, and not losing the forward momentum of product innovation.
Tech Debt, the accumulation of work based on legacy systems, emerges as a major roadblock to innovation. Proactively addressing tech debt to maintain the innovative engine of your software startup is a must. The key? Get ahead of it by treating customer service as a product line. Take an engineering approach to the beast of Tech Debt, and allocate your development capacity to identify and permanently solve recurring issues. This strategic approach aims not only to streamline customer service but also to foster continuous innovation within the business.
If adding more customers means that you need to add more customer support people proportionately, then your business isn't scaling very well.
The key to growing a business is scaling profitably.
You need to add customers at a rate that is much faster than the rate at which you add customer service people.
Your company becomes massively profitable as your marginal revenues grow, and your marginal costs decrease.
Fix your product so that you eliminate customer support
Regardless of your business, you'll notice patterns in the types of customer support requests you get.
There will be known pitfalls with your product that create customer support issues. Fix these first.
If you're the CEO/CTO, you should be creeping in your helpdesk to see what's going on in there. Your customer service people only respond to tickets, but you'll need to be the person who takes the initiative to eliminate recurring issues.
Bonus: Metrics:
And don’t entirely rely on metrics. For example, if you focus on a single category - say ticket closure rates - you’re only getting part of the picture. What the customer adequately helped? Did they leave with a good taste in their mouth? Go deeper and prioritize customer satisfaction metrics, such as post-closure feedback, as a more accurate gauge of the effectiveness of customer service.
Again, it’s a mindset shift - treat customer service as a product line rather than a burden. Material investments to improve customer support systems, enhance end-user experiences, and foster a culture of continuous improvement within the organization.
Summary
Customer service is a product line
People don’t want customer service, but you’ll probably have to have it.
Quality customer service can be a material differentiator