At Looxii the office dogs nearly out number the human employees, but until they learn how to blog or master accounting basics we’re stuck doing it all. It’s the nature of the startup, we have a colorful variety of tasks to attend to everyday.
Flexibility and Inter-Department Communication
While this environment requires each employee to perform multiple duties, it also gives us the advantage of quick, flexible product development that is directly influenced by customer service. While creating the next product update, or pushing out bug fixes we can immediately take into account user issues and needs. Although your business may not have a similar startup environment, good communication enables flexibility and better customer service. This may seem like standard operating procedure for many businesses, but often getting information to the correct department, and getting that department to take action on it, can be costly in both time and resources.
Startup Tools for Customer Service
Another benefit to having fewer employees is that we can easily agree upon which software tools work for us without making a major overhaul to the operations of the company. Skype is one of the most useful tools as it gives us a great free video conference tool and allows us to provide screen shares for product demos.
More of our in-house favorites include Google docs, which allows us to cooperatively edit everything from letters to spreadsheets, and Google calendar, which easily syncs to our android powered phones (no offense to iPhone fanboys and fangirls).
For task management and to-do lists we like to use Basecamp. While these tools also have a wider office application beyond customer service, they allow us to streamline our productivity more effectively than many of the enterprise level solutions we’ve used in our previous employment lives.
Customer Response
Our position as a startup is unique. In contrast to bigger more established businesses, we respond directly to every customer request or phone call to personally ensure that they are satisfied with their Looxii experience. As our customer base grows, we’ve identified exceptional, personable customer service as a core part of our company’s culture.
In the end it’s all about the customer. They’re the ones that keep the lights on and keep us from eating dog food (literally – I’m not talking about the cliché). What positives/negatives stick out in your past customer service experiences? Conversely, if you’re a biz, what tools help you deliver kick-ass customer service?
