5 Ways to Improve Your Startups’ Customer Support

Getting a startup off the ground is a lot of work – we know, we’ve been there. Between raising funding, taking care of admin, perfecting your branding and keeping stakeholders happy, it can be easy to overlook one of the most fundamental pillars of any company – customer support.

Good support is essential both for attracting new customers and for keeping your current customer base engaged. The key is making sure you can meet your customer’s needs, without getting overwhelmed by endless queries and complaints.

That’s why our team put together some simple but effective ways you can up your customer support game.

Set Up Your Website’s FAQ Page

The first step to building an efficient customer support system is minimising unnecessary contact with the customer. The more information they can find by themselves online, the less likely they are to get in touch with you and the more time you can spend on other tasks. Setting up a clear but informative FAQ (or Frequently Asked Questions) page on your website takes a bit of extra effort, but can half the amount of time you spend on customer calls or emails in the long run. Divide the page into categories (Our Services, Delivery Information, Billing etc.) so your customer can easily find what they are looking for and keep the ‘contact us’ section till the very end.

Start Using Email Templates

No matter how much information is on your website, some things can still only be handled by contacting a support agent. A lot of the time though, agents will find themselves typing out the same information over and over again, but changing a small detail like the customer name or Order number. Make life easy for your CS team by creating editable template answers for your most frequent queries. Whether your business uses Gmail or an advanced ticketing software, taking the time to create a few generic email templates is a total game changer.

Get A Virtual Receptionist

Some customers just prefer a good old fashioned phone call. Whether its because they don’t have time to wait around for an email response, or because they want to discuss a more complex issue over the phone, it’s important that your startup can handle incoming calls. That’s why here at Callbrix, we use a Virtual Receptionist to manage all our customer calls. It only takes a few minutes to set up online (no hardware required!) and takes care of filtering out spam calls, communicating your opening hours, routing calls to the correct person and notifying you whenever you have missed a call.

Be Engaging

Remember, your startup wouldn’t exist without your customers – so make an effort engage with them! Take the time to use your customer’s first name instead of a generic ‘Dear Sir/Madam’, wish them a nice day at the end of your conversation and include a friendly sign off. Make the customer feel like they are speaking to a real human being, not just a chatbot.

Analyze Your Customer Queries

How many calls does your business get in a day? Which departments do people want to talk to most? How long does the average customer interaction take? Customer support isn’t just about answering queries and handling complaints, it’s also a great source of data. Our support team use Call Analytics to keep track of all our calls, and you can too!

Check out our call analytics, virtual receptionist and other great phone system features here.