How Customer Service Helps Startups Compete With Big Companies

According to many well-known respective periodicals of the internet and on paper, such B2B activity as customer service keeps growing, thriving, and improving (or discrediting) image of various companies and entrepreneurships. Thus, it becomes the most influential tool to adjust customer’s impression of the product or service. NewVoiceMedia reports that due to bad customer support companies lose more than $62 billion.

But despite the info above, in general, customer support is getting better, allowing small companies with top support compete with business giants that at times don’t even care about their customers.

After all – if we remember our last cases of communicating with an online or offline support of any kind, how fast and precise was the response? Were they friendly, timely, professional? Statistically – not at all. More as exceptions than as regularity. This clearly shows us that customer support is by far an underrated aspect of production, therefore leading to an unpleasant conclusion that the Big Bosses of the world care far too little about their sources of income.

Size Doesn’t Matter

However, small companies with friendly and competent support tend to receive much higher ratings, and on the contrary, even the best of the best may ruin their image by neglecting customers’ requests.
Thus, it is clear that in this case, we face the proverb “Courtesy costs nothing but can buy anything”. Quite logical is the derivation: why not invest into it?
And we come to kinds and ways of support. Mostly nowadays it’s phone lines, emails, and chats. And day by day it is just one device that does it all – a smartphone.

Gradually capturing the market, top smartphones are almost as capable as desktop PCs and laptops, sometimes even more productive – and indubitably more mobile and handy. Why would a person need another 5 kilos to his or her travel bag if by simply buying a new smartphone this need is satisfied?

Of course, unlike the computer operating systems, those for phones are a bit less informative: there’s just not enough screen space. Same with all kinds of software additional features, including support communication. But time goes on, and customers’ demand must be met by the respective supply: comfortable, productive and user-friendly customer support functionality.

Takeaway

And that’s what most of the apps lack – just the good old email links and phone numbers, and no integrated chat or automatic log transfer in case of an error message. Thereby, every case needs a lot of investigation – finding out the credentials and app version and exact error message and screenshot and what not, whereas it all could be easily implemented into the app before production. Worse reviews – worse rating – worse sales. We all know where this road leads, right?

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