Why Customer Engagement & Support is Essential for your Startup Culture

I read somewhere once that every businesses should try to make a customer, not a sale. It got stuck with me, and when we started building Knowlarity few years ago few things were always clear, we clearly understood that if we were to build a global brand we may never have a product or price advantage, these things can be easily duplicated, but a strong customer service culture can’t be copied. I say culture because I truly believe that Customer Service or Customer Engagement can’t be a process or a strategy, it has to drive within the core of your company culture, you need to continually evolve the customer engagement pattern within your organisation, dedicate resources to where your customers are, make tuning to how you work with them to resolve their query.

Until recently we had a strong hierarchical system for customer support, we had a tier 1 support line that would take calls, log tickets and assign to support or sales depending on query, if something can’t be fixed by these teams on spot this was raised to an Tier 2 team or what you can call an escalations team, who would give a timeframe for resolution and re-assign ticket to various department to find the problem. We soon find out that this system had too many loopholes and decreased our ability to respond quickly. We went back to our drawing board and sat through countless discussions in a single day to power up our support team by initiating a first call resolution, simply giving the training and resources to our support team to solve 65% of queries within the first call itself. This increased the productivity by manifold and efficiency of our escalations team went up through the roof. All this achieved in a very short span of time simply by empowering Tier-1 support with right resources and analytical decision making. I for starters believe that customers don’t expect you to be perfect. They are understanding but not unforgiving, however they do expect you to fix things when you go wrong, they want you to own up your mistakes and get work done.

One more things that we do is have a all hands down meetings with different teams participation once every week, including engineering, sales, support, marketing and talk stuff, and I mean not just reports but literally talk what’s going good and bad and how performance can be increased on deliverables. We have a motto that say “Customer First, Always” and we try to implement this in everything we do even if that means reinventing ourselves and evolving every few days to make things better for them. Every day we are building new custom tools, analytics dashboards, KPI Metric meters to pursue customer satisfaction and all roads leads in only that direction.

About the Author:

The Above article has been contributed by Knowlarity Communications – Pioneers of Cloud Telephony in India.

Image Credit: Dell Inc.