Blog

Getting a startup off its feet and turning it into a success story is no easy feat, especially in today’s competitive market. A great idea is absolutely essential for making an initial mark, but for survival it is important to keep the customers happy time and time again,

which is only possible if you’ve got the best customer service among all the competition. You can make do with community support for your product/service at first, and while it is quite a tempting solution (cost and simplicity wise), it simply won’t be able to grow with your customer base, and will ultimately stagnate. A far more efficient and helpful approach would be to go for a dedicated online help desk solution to make business operations more streamlined and enhance your customer support. The common perception is that these solutions are only applicable to the big leagues. But here are three reasons why they work equally well for small businesses and startups:

STAY CONNECTED WITH YOUR CLIENTELE FROM CENTRAL HUB

Lots of help desk services offer something known as “multi-channel help desk“. What this basically means is the integration of Email, VOIP, Chat, Facebook, Twitter and web requests into support tickets, categorized and organized at a central location. Email and social media integration are especially important for small businesses.

Email support is a frequently employed initial support procedure for many startups, since it is easy and doesn’t require much technical administration, and transitioning to a dedicated help desk system all at once can be a major change for your staff, as well as your customers. A help desk system does away with the need to deal with this change for those customers who wish to stick to using the old way to get support. They can continue to correspond with you on email, while under the hood of your customer service system.

Social media (Facebook and Twitter) integration turns your company / visitor posts and tweets into support tickets, which translates into excellent customer interaction for your business. Remember, maintaining good PR with your customers will be the lifeline for your budding enterprise, and with the majority of consumers today being so tech savvy, it’s better to give them a direct way to express their opinions on your product, whether they’re good or bad. Help desk lets you convert this feedback directly into formal support requests, so your customers (both current and potential) find the company a lot more accessible, resulting in improved trust, and, in the long run, revenue.

KEEP YOUR STAFF MOTIVATED

Let’s face it, working in support isn’t the most thrilling prospect for an employee, even at a large company. As a startup, customer service will at first be handled as a shared task among some or all of the founding members, who will be dedicated and thorough about it thanks to the common vision they share. But as you start growing and bringing in more employees into the fold, your customer support department will become filled with people who are interested in earning a salary more than in meeting your vision of the startup – this holds especially true for companies that outsource customer handling to third party firms / individuals. To ensure that this doesn’t devolve into a generic treatment for your clientele and result in potential loss of business, most Help desk services let you keep things interesting by letting you set up achievement levels and quests for your support team in line with your startup’s endgame to keep them motivated through healthy competition.

Related : Customer Support Software Tips : How to motivate your support staff

SUPPORT FOR MULTIPLE BRANDS

A smart entrepreneur understands the importance of handling the support of various products/services separately, or rather, the risks of handling them together from the same place. The latter approach works at the start when your clientele is smaller, and business has only started to grow. But grow it will, and when it does, your staff will be swamped with ticket requests from multiple products/services, and confusion will result pertaining to prioritization and task delegation. Help desk software gets rid of this potential dilemma by empowering you to offer separate branded support for each of your products or services. This means you’ll be able to administer your support team efficiently so the customers of each one of your products get the attention and care they deserve. Do you have any questions? Don’t hesitate to contact us for more information.