Why getting customer service right was the key to our start up success
We’re a London based start up and like many London based start ups we’re faced with all the same challenges as every one else. Product market fit, growth, investment, hiring. The list is endless. However in 2014 we decided to focus on our customer service and it helped everything else fall into place. I’m going to run through a quick 4 points of why that approach worked so well for us in 2014 and why we have been growing between 20-30% every month since.
1. It left customers happy.
With so much else going on in your bubble it can often be so easy to forget why you are even in business in the first place. And that’s because you’re creating a service or product that people actually want. Poor customer service leaves customers disappointed and its very likely they won’t come back again if they don’t feel they are getting the service they deserve. However by keeping our customers happy we started to see repeat business, word of mouth referrals, sky high reviews and aNet Promoter Score of 67.
2. It increased our sales conversion.
With happier customers who were getting our attention much quicker, sales were only going to go one way and that was up. By focusing on giving customers a great experience and fast response time it meant that not only sales went up but our sales conversion increased also. This had the double knock on effect of reducing our customer acquisition cost, thus saving us money.
3. It focused us on the important things and not the vanity metrics.
Perhaps some of the most popular chat and news stories in start up circles are about how much a start up raised and at what valuation. Raising money can be essential for the success of a start up but it can be very easy to get lost in the investor scene by going to meeting after meeting and flogging your concept in the hope of getting an injection of cash. However as many start up founders will know raising cash is not a quick process and very quickly a lot of time can pass by without any meaningful increase in the important metrics of your start up and that’s growth! By focusing on giving great customer service, we were able to grow and not lose lots of valuable time running around London going from meeting to meeting.
4. It made investors come to us (not us go to them).
And this brings me to our final point. We decided to embark on 2014 by using what little money we had to focus on growth and fuelling that growth was excellent customer service and the hiring of people who could help us provide this first class experience that would contribute value directly to the bottom line. And the results of this? By focusing on the things that matter (growth fuelled by excellent customer service) we were able to get investors excited in us as the things that do matter were showing a positive trend over a prolonged period of time. Without us actively attempting to raise money we were able to quickly and easily raise the cash we felt would help us move to the next stage of our adventure.
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Authored by: Andrew Jervis