Web Tips: Scaling a High Touch Business

Customer service & account management can be one of the harder elements to scale especially in high touch startups- I’ve experienced it. For many small businesses there appears to only be two options, outsource customer service, or bring in a new member of staff. Here’s a few ways we’ve managed to scale without outsourcing or bringing in new hires.

Simplify

Simplifying your processes especially when it comes to repeatable tasks will help ensure you’re spending less time on each customer, without a decrease in the quality of service. There are a few effective and low cost ways you can simplify things.

1. Canned responses or templates in place for frequently asked questions. Tweaking or personalising templates can drastically reduce the time spent on each customer without compromising on the amount of information you give them. Having canned responses lined up can be a great & simple way to speed up the process of responding to customers.

2. Create Resources. Got a certain service or product that needs a lot of explaining? Create a guide for it. Send it if alongside the answers to their first question, and you potentially save yourself having to answer any follow-ups. If the guide is easy to find, you may even avoid the interaction, as the customer can self serve.

3. Make it easy to self serve. Having a knowledge base is vital whatever industry you’re in, many customers would prefer to find information themselves, especially if they’re in a rush and don’t want to wait on email responses. With this in mind, ensure you have a knowledge base, and that it’s easy to find, put it in your main menu on your website and in the footer of emails. Make self service a breeze, and save yourself and your team time answering questions.

4. Make frequently asked questions, calls to action. If you’re getting asked the same thing a lot, make it easier for customers to resolve this themselves. For example if you’re being asked for sample products everyday, maybe have a button for people to order samples right on the home page or the product page. Make it easy for customers and they won’t need your help. Great user experience is everything, and it doesn’t need to be complicated.

5. Everything is a process. Make everything you do in your business a process, as soon as you can map out the process you can assess ways to simplify it, or ways it can be automated. Process mapping is invaluable, and doesn’t cost a thing.

Automate

Once things are simplified you can then look at ways to automate things, removing yourself and your team from needing to manually manage processes. There are a few simple low cost ways you can automate things.

1. Use chatbots. Using platforms like https://www.tidio.com/ you can easily setup a workflow or automation rules for a chatbot, allowing your customers to get questions fast without having to hunt through a long list of FAQ’s. This can be much lower cost than you’d expect and can save hours if you’re able to automate the question answering of some of your most common questions. You can even have live chat alongside this, again helping to enable your customers to get answers fast. More efficient customer service, can also be better customer service.

2. Set up rules & workflows. Whether it’s in your emails, helpdesk software or overall business structure rules and workflows allow for speed and scalability. It could be that you create a form that automatically calculates pricing for your customers, rather than manually quoting them. You may set up a rule that guides all customers with a specific question to a specific page or area of your knowledge base. Whatever it is, rules and workflows ensure efficient processes that can work at scale.

3. Let your customers generate your answers for you. Software companies are very good at this. Colorlib have a great example of this being done right, they provide wordpress themes (among other services), and have a support forum for customers to ask questions. On many occasions you can find answers being given by others in the community, alongside Colorlib staff. This also comes with the additional benefit that customers can browse through other peoples questions to find answers for their own problems. This is essentially a knowledge base built by your customers, with customers also helping to answer each others questions. If you can build a tight knit community that want to help each other, you not only make customer service easier, but you increase brand loyalty.

Taken from: u/alexfranklin365, r/startups