4 Fatal Startup Customer Service Mishaps

Customer service is often deprioritized by startup and early expansion stage company managers due to the fact that it is human capital intensive and long-term focused. However, what these management teams neglect to realize is that one of their company’s primary competitive advantages over larger enterprises is the opportunity to develop intimate and long-lasting relationships with their customers.

4 Customer Service Mishaps that can Break the Back of your Company

1. Launching a premature, incomplete or untested product

There is nothing that annoys customers more than being sold a bug-ridden or incomplete product that was advertised as ready for market. If you plan on doing an early release, make sure to limit the trial to a handful of “test customers” and let them know that the product is still in its testing trials.

Blaming customers for their own complaints

Customers do not like being blamed for the problems they report even if they are the result of their own user errors. A frustrated customer can easily become an angry customer, so just helping them resolve their problem quickly is the best way to defuse these situations.

Being unresponsive or slow to respond to customer questions

This behavior really aggravates customers. The longer customers wait, the more frustrated customers will become and the harder they will be to deal with and keep happy. If you don’t acknowledge them at all, they will likely turn to the internet to voice their complaints and this could become very damaging to your brand.

Providing an unfriendly customer atmosphere or business experience

Customers hate rude and unhelpful customer service representatives and love to complain about these experiences via social media. Don’t be Comcast.

Unfortunately, these missteps can be quite costly or even fatal as customers rarely forget bad customer service experiences and often opt to warn friends about poor customer service experiences. In the age of social media, a couple bad customer service experiences can go viral and break the back of a young company as it is just starting to get off the ground. Thus, this is not an area where you can cut corners without major consequences. In fact, superior customer service can actually be a great sales tool as Zappos proved in its ascendance in the online shoe marketplace, so it is almost always worth investing some time and capital into a customer support group.

If you are interested in learning more about customer service and how it has changed in the social media age, you should read my blog post on why Twitter should be used as a customer service medium. Similarly, if you are interested in learning more about CRM implementation and how to develop a first class customer service model, I highly recommend reading The Best Service is No Service: How to Liberate Your Customers from Customer Service, Keep Them Happy, and Control Costs by Bill Price.