A very common mistake made by start-up companies, and indeed smaller businesses in general, is to not take customer service seriously. Too often, managers think all it entails is answering the phone promptly and being polite to customers – and how often do companies fail to do even that!

In fact, customer service can soon become more important to a start-up than sales and marketing, helping it retain customers (selling to existing customers is much cheaper than finding fresh ones) and maximize its income from them. Good customer service can also help gain new customers, as word spreads about how great a particular company is to do business with. Managers should, therefore, have a strategy for customer service which goes well beyond simply being polite on the telephone.

So if you are starting a new company, how do you go about delivering good customer service? Begin by thinking what customers might reasonably expect as a basic level of service. For a shop, that could be having friendly, knowledgeable sales staff to help them and a good range of products in stock. That, in turn, means being careful to hire the right kind of people, giving them adequate product training and having effective stock control procedures in place.

But achieving a basic level of service isn’t enough if you want your start-up to be really successful. You must find ways to exceed the expectations of your customers – remember, the objective is to have them tell their friends and colleagues that your company is “great”, rather than just “not bad” or “OK”.

One low cost way to do this is to consciously control the expectations of your customers, by always making promises to them that you know you can exceed. For example, if it will take a week for your shop to supply a spare part you should tell the customer it will take ten days. Then when the part arrives ‘early’ he or she will think you have done a great job getting it to them so soon.

Using technology

One reason why owner/managers often overlook including customer service in their plans for their new business is because they assume they will be directly responsible for taking care of all customers. They know how to look after their customers, and that’s all there is to it. But when their businesses grow and they need to take on staff, suddenly personally maintaining a high level of customer service is no longer feasible. Without any strategy or systems in place these start-ups can soon fall into the trap of many a growing business: providing customers with a poorer service despite becoming more successful.

Of course, the big corporations are only too aware of the importance of customer service, and spend a lot of time and money making sure it stays at a high standard no matter how many employees they have. The good news is that nowadays even the smallest company can adopt a lot of the same methods as the big boys, but at a fraction of the cost.

These include providing staff with written procedures (accessible over the office network) for handling customers, whether they are making a complaint or simply asking for a price. Managers should also consider installing CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software. This gives employees easy access to all relevant information about a customer, so that they can always deal with enquiries efficiently and effectively. CRM systems used to cost a fortune; now you can pick them up as ‘freeware’ on the Internet.

Customer service: like it or not, there’s now a lot more to it than simply saying “have a nice day” when you hand back the change!

Case Study

TF Tuned Shox tunes, services and sells suspensions for top-of-the-line mountain bikes. It isn’t the only company doing this, but unlike its rivals it has managed an impressive 20 per cent annual growth over the past four-and-a-half years, with the workforce expanding from just its husband-and-wife founders to seven employees. Along the way it has cultivated an excellent reputation, with suspension units being shipped to its Somerset, England workshop from as far as Canada and Australia.

Critical to TF’s success has been a dedication not only to quality but also to customer service, with most units ready to be returned within 24 hours of receipt, much to their owners’ appreciation. To do this, the company has had to invest in an extensive stock of spares – something which TF’s competitors do not do, forcing them to wait for parts to arrive from manufacturers before they can work on a suspension.

Providing a first-class service which both wins and retains customers can entail far more than politeness. For TF it went to the core of how the business was organized, with money being spent in an area – inventory – that may not be immediately associated with customer service.