You’d not have started your business if it weren’t for your entrepreneurial gut: that raging, craving, and almost fiery beast shifting restlessly. If it weren’t for that idea and that dream, your business would never be “business”.
Lucky for us, this is the best time to be in business. You find the holy grail where technology meets business. Never before, in the history of mankind, was it possible to get the tools you needed to run your business better at such affordable prices and with such ease.
While many apps, web-based tools, and SaaS products certainly help put your business on steroids and give you enormous power, customer support can never be relegated to automation or SaaS tools.
Don’t get me wrong. I am more passionate than anyone on web-based tools and SaaS products, but customer service isn’t so much about tools.
It’s really about you. Your company’s culture. Your organization’s DNA. Here’s why you shouldn’t focus so much about tools than you should about “People”.
People mean business; not tools
You have the best of FreshDesk, Zendesk, and GrooveHQ. Those tools are powerful and they can almost obviate the need for a full-service call center. So, what happens when a support ticket goes in? What do you do when a customer calls? How do you handle pre-sale objections?
Tools can only help. They can streamline your business. They bring down your costs. They can help you make your customer support process more efficient.
To please that customer who just sent in the support ticket, however, you’d need more than a collection of support ticket management tools.
You’d need love, that’s what
Grumpy Service Staff Can Kill Your Business
For all the fancy web-based tools and Saas applications you have, a single grumpy sales agent, support staff, or a frustrated tweet can ruin all that you ever tried to build. There’s a reason why Sir Richard Branson quips:
“Happy Employees lead to profitable businesses”
Make sure your vendors, freelancers, full-time staff, and everyone associated with your business is in-line with the need to provide exemplary customer service. A broken link here is a broken profit-and-loss statement.
Your customers don’t care
All that your customers care about is them, and I know that you know it. Whether you plonk down $29 per month for a support ticket system or a $1999 per month on a sophisticated, enterprise-grade customer service suite, it’d not matter for a customer who never got a reply for her query sent 3 days ago.
She wouldn’t care how big or small you are. She couldn’t care if your team went off on a holiday. She won’t even know if you hosted your FAQ pages on premium servers.
Also, she won’t care if you used FreshDesk or ZenDesk. It’s not her priority if you held a weekly “customer-service” meeting or not.
Nothing moves the needle until your customer leaves the live chat window happy.
Customer support isn’t a business function
Most of us have a “text book syndrome” (I coined it). We like to be organized and efficient, and for that we build separate functions in business so that your organization is setup right. We forget, however, that some functions aren’t “functions” of a business; they are a lot more.
Marketing isn’t a business function with a Marketing Head and a bevy of sales people. Marketing is what makes a business money. Would you relegate that to a business department?
Customer support is what keeps the customer (after all the marketing drama happens). As such, there are multiple factors that work in tandem to keep the customer happy. It takes even more to make the customer your evangelist. So she goes and shouts off the top of cliffs (or on social media) about your business.
Now, is that a “function” at all?
For great customer support, you need a great product or service backed by an incredible set of people working as teams and the best possible implementation of technology.
You won’t find that on the feature list of a SaaS product or customer service app. It’s there, in your heart. Or It’s not.
What do you think?
Img Credits: FrontRiver on Flickr
