How should a small startup handle customer service?

To be honest, doing customer support with phone is not a good idea anymore because it’s more simple to send you a message on internet rather than calling you.You should really try a live-chat. At https://crisp.im/, we built a simple customer service made for your needs, handling livechat and e-mails.Here is our dashboard: Crisp works with a shared inbox across your team and handles unlimited chats and team members.We support Mac and Windows apps, as well as native iOS and Android Apps and many other cool features You can see what your visitors types in real-time Extended informations from your user e-mail address (Avatar, Cover Picture, Twitter Bio, etc). If you don’t reply in 1′30m to your user, your are notified by e-mail too and you can reply by e-mail to your user. (Your visitor can do the same). Initiate users on your website You can manage unlimited websites with the same account and unlimited accounts in the same website (like Slack) You can check if message has been read, delivered by chat or e-mail

For startup companies, it would be best if customer service will be handled by an outsourcing vendor. That way, its management will be able to focus on its core operations to keep the business running. http://www.infinitcontact.com/ can help you achieve such goals. With 10 years of experience in the field of business process outsourcing, you may rest assured that your customer service will be handled by professional experts. Why choose this company? Quality will always be on top of its priority list. This is the main reason why the company solidified its commitment through securing its ISO certification. Feel free to visit the website to find out how Infinit Contact can help you achieve your goals to success.

As a startup I imagine you'll want to keep a finger on the pulse of the market so you can adapt your product or service using customer feedback, which might make it tempting to keep your customer service in-house for now. On the other hand, you don't want to spend so much time handling customer service that you have no time left to focus on your core job. You'll also want to be prepared for growth and an increase of customer service calls or emails.I work at http://www.5ca.com/?utm_source=Quora&utm_medium=Answer&utm_campaign=How+should+a+small+startup+handle+customer+service%3F, which is a contact center that handles customer service for a number of companies in the tech and gaming industries. We work with shared agents, meaning our agents are trained on multiple projects so they'll always be able to be productive. For our clients this means we're able to offer them a pay-per-use pricing model so that - if we do only handle a few calls per day - our clients are only charged for the time spent on those calls.We also offer extensive reporting so you won't miss out on any of that valuable customer feedback that you'll want to have in the early stages. Don't think of outsourcing as passing off the work but rather as partnering with an expert in customer service.

When it involves payment, I would always recommend using a phone line. That would make you look bigger to your customer and also local. http://Aircall.io is a great tool for that, but I think someone mentioned it before me :) Good luck

For a small startup I would recommend http://www.toky.co/ It´s a virtual phone system which allows you to take business calls con your mobile or computer. It offers all the features of a business phone system at a much lower price and can be setup in seconds. They also have a free click to call button you can embed on your site so customers can call you for free with just a click. This is great to increase leads and sales form your website.

My first suggestion is that ensure your product is robust, so it doesn't generate complaints or support mails. Understand the Customer Journey and find out what can possibly go wrong. Classify what can go wrong into following groups: Life threatening to customers Results in Customer being non-compliant Renders the product unfit for use Partial malfunction Noticeable loss of performance Minor performance loss (unnoticeable) Minor nuisance If there are too many items in first 4 categories, you better plan for 24x7 support Build strong help and FAQ features through videos & text Q&A in your website. In spite of all the above, you are bound to encounter a reasonably healthy rate of support requests :-(... That's life. I don't know what kind of product or service you are into, if its time-sensitive or offers critical services, etc then 24X7 support is a good idea even if the volume is low. But if its not that sensitive and doesn't impact your customer's daily life in a big way, then even if your product/service is paid (& highly paid), customers will be ok with reasonable responsiveness. So its nothing to do with your volumes, its to do with the criticality of your service. My personal suggestion is that give an personalized email id (not support@...) but (Someone'sName@....). Give phone line and set up a good voice mail message. Also clearly mention the expected response time for resolution. Set up a filter in your email box to catch keywords like "URGENT", "CRITICAL", and route them to a separate folder. Check that folder first thing in the morning as you get up :-) This has been working for 5 years for me! Good Luckhttp://www.collaborat.com/future-fit-services/customer-experience/

I will be honest. When we were working on our http://civilhub.org/, we couldn’t afford any of the customer service online tools. That’s why we started working on our own application.We put so much heart in it that we decided to invest all our resources to make it a super easy and intuitive app in terms of Customer Support.Our live chat has all the common features, like a real time communication, a user-friendly interface, attaching files, videos and pictures, but we also give an ability to assign a conversation to a particular user (helps to keep everything organized), enter predefined messages (default replies to make the communication faster) and also to send a message via email if a user isn’t online anymore.Deliver personalized messages thanks to all the data we collect on your users.Create a marketing campaign → Send a chat message to everybody whose browser language is Spanish and welcome them in their native language. Full automation. All personalized.Of course, the history of all the conversations is accessible is gathered in one single place to have it right there when you need it.Try it out, I would be really grateful for your remarks & comments.Your feedback is the precious thing we could ask for :-)

As a startup founder, you have two big advantages with regards to customer service. The first is that you know every area of your company intimately. The second is that you have the authority to act on behalf of the customer and make promises to resolve problems immediately. Whatever you do with customer service you need to make sure that you don’t lose sight of these two advantages. This competitive advantage centers on the one thing that matters most when handling customer requests: efficient resolution. Whatever problems come up, you need to be on call to fix things in the moment. To do this, begin relying on tools like you never have before. Even if it costs extra, purchase licenses to the best tools. This upfront investment in great tools will pay off in spades. Of course, using great tools only scratches the surface of how startups should handle customer service. If you’re thinking of digging into the problem deeper, I’d urge you to check out http://blog.bestunning.net/customer-service-tips-for-startups/.

That’s true, as your business continues to grow work e-mails certainly wouldn’t be sufficient (and effective too, for that matter). Complaints would eventually come and go through many different channels and to keep up with them you’d probably need the assistance of a helpdesk software, integrating your support into one place.There are https://help-desk-software.financesonline.com/, though some of them can be quite pricey for a small startup. If you want something more affordable, easy-to-setup and offers quick on-boarding, https://www.bornevia.com/features/ might be one you want to keep in mind. Boasting simplicity, the core features you need are all still there; offering seamless multichannel experience. You can give it a try for free for 17 days, and see if you like it: And in regards to outsourcing, I have to agree with the others not to do so at this point. For me it makes your customer service feels slightly impersonal which isn’t too good in starting a business (your audience wants as much human-to-human interactions!) Better handle it internally and allocate your growing team with the tasks.