Taking Down the Giant: Tipping the Scales with Superb Customer Service

This is the final post in a three-part series that highlights a few ways smaller startups and expansion stage companies can win against big competitors. To read the intro to the series, click here. To read the previous two posts, click here and here.

As consumers, we’ve all been through positive and negative customer service experiences.

The biggest offenders of horrid customer service seem to always include banks, airlines, insurance companies, and cable providers. But some big technology corporations — including some of the high tech behemoths you probably compete against — can be notoriously bad, too.

I won’t name names. But you know the process: Call a generic customer service number and get a clueless rep on the line. They might not understand your problem, so they pass you off to someone else. You wait on hold for 20 minutes, get some murky answer (like “we’ll look into it”), and when it’s all said and done you either haven’t accomplished much or you’re worse off than when you first called in. And all that assumes you actually get a human on the phone.

Now, think about your last customer service experience with a smaller company without a dedicated customer service team. Probably worse than your call with the big guy, right?

Maybe not. Because when a customer calls in with a complaint to a startup that can’t afford for its customers to be unhappy, they might get the CEO on the line. At worst, they’re probably talking to a senior product developer or VP. And if the problem’s not solved immediately, that customer can rest easy knowing that the business’s leadership is aware of it and working diligently to fix it.

Advantage little guy.

Zappos is the classic case study of a company that’s made customer service its hallmark. Twelve years after being founded, some of the online retailer’s customer service stories are borderline legendary.

For example, there was the time that a customer called Zappos’ customer service team desperately trying to find a replacement pair of shoes that she had neglected to pack for a business trip. The company no longer had the shoes in stock, but Zappos wasn’t satisfied giving that answer to its customer.

Instead, one of the company’s customer service reps found the shoes at a local Las Vegas mall, sent some Zappos employees to buy them, and delivered them to the customer’s hotel room – all at no charge.

Talk about taking the saying “going the extra mile for your customers” to the literal extreme.

But Zappos is a big company. So why use them as an example?

Because Zappos didn’t wait until it was a $1 billion business with 1,500 employees to focus on customer service. Tony Hseih, who took over as CEO in 2001 when the company wasn’t yet profitable, made it Zappos’ mantra from day one. And it’s absolutely inarguable that the decision to go above and beyond traditional customer service practices helped Zappos differentiate itself in a very crowded retail market.

That’s a lesson that startup or expansion stage software companies going against industry powerhouses like IBM, Oracle, and CA Technologies can certainly learn from. As much as those bigger companies try to be great at customer service, their corporate hierarchy, standard operating procedures, and product inflexibility often hinder response times and fail to create the personal touch that great customer service requires.

As Anthony Tjan writes in an article for the Harvard Business Review, too much of large company customer service has devolved into rigid practices and scripted processes. It’s delivered with artificial sincerity and completely lacks a true sense of urgency. Smaller companies, on the other hand, possess the innate ability — through their size and agility — to offer sincere empathy, common sense problem solving, and speedier responsiveness.

And therein lies the true opportunity. If your solution is similar to your bigger competitors (or maybe it’s better) and you can provide transcending customer service, who do you think most customers are going to want to do business with? 

That does it for this series. If you have any other suggestions for how smaller startup and expansion stage companies can win against bigger competitors, feel free to leave them in the comments section!