Making your startup take off: Set your customer support values first

The word for 2015 is hustle. Despite the crisis, myriads of startups popping up here and there, tech industry blooming and money flowing around like hotcakes. Looks good if you’re an already established business but taking off seems to be harder than usual. It’s all about interactions, engagement and user experience today. It matters as never before and becomes your key differentiator. One of the main components here is customer relationship management and support, and we think you should really set it right and test it prior to scaling, actively selling and marketing your products or services.

We love discussing this issue and look forward to your opinions, feel free to emails us, as we share our list of customer support values you should incorporate as your business values.

Fist and foremost, you should understand that customer support values have to be addressed prior to gearing up. Take a look at the DoorDash team (YC):

“..at the beginning we were the delivery drivers. We would go to class, and then after we would go deliver food. We were the customer support…”

“… it also allows you to become an expert in your business, like driving helped us understand how the whole delivery process worked…”

It’s people, communication, requests, complaints, leads and more things to handle that seem easy when you’re going on neutral but it becomes a mess as soon as you hit the gas. Support Is hard. It’s one of the hardest jobs in any company. We took a minute to think about some basics here and put it in 3 simple points:

1. Fearlessness learning

Try to think of it as your ability to take dynamic roles by getting back from working on your business model to coding, designing and answering emails. All the insights you need to take your product from good to great are down there close to where real communication happens.

It’s not supposed to make you happy at first as you’re going to get lots of requests and complaints but seeing it and answering yourself allows you to learn from customers and feel their pain. It applies to your teammates as well and provides them with a fresh view of what’s going on with your business.

Don’t hesitate to ask questions, look and listen for clues about their mood and personality, try to figure out what they want but do take it as what you should really do next with your product or service. Customer feedback makes you see what you did wrong, learn from it, digest and think about your next move.

2. Clear communication

It’s always a good thing to analyse your company’s voice and set it right. Who’d like to have a conversation with a robot? Nobody. Anyone willing to read a sales pitch? No. Though this is exactly what happens when your communication is broken. You learn but don’t know how to communicate.

You don’t want to rush your clients out the door. Don’t push it with selling, keep it simple: explain, provide facts and be objective. It’s how you make people feel that matters most so try to make it to the level when they get competent service.

It’s always cool to get handwritten Christmas cards from CEO, designer or developer that works on delivering you best experience possible. Communicate back like a human and they’ll feel that you care about your clients.

3. Passion for details

Listening, learning and communicating with clear and caring tone is great. Let’s take a step further and think about ways to manage it. You want every single customer interaction available for you to take action on in a simple, browsable and easy-to-use way.

Details matter as you want to communicate with your clients as quickly and efficiently as possible. It’s the experience all the way around here.

We’re always improving our products, adding features to our CRM and Helpdesk plugins available to those who use Redmine. Tons of requests to add private notes and issues to private tickets made us think about it and eventually add these options.

In addition, we’ve just added Redmine Mailchimp plugin that’s truly a bomb for those who’d like to manage MailChimp subscribers from RedmineCRM contacts and companies.