Why Startups Should Prioritize Customer Service

Usually when I see the same topics make it to the front page again and again, I get somewhat annoyed. But when articles that highlight the importance of customer service make it, I am genuinely happy to see it. Why? Well quite frankly, it is an area that still needs work and given how many aspiring tech founders are on HN, it is an excellent place to reiterate such a point.

Personal anecdote if you care to read: My roommate and I launched a mobile app a little over a year ago on our campus and it didn't do as well as we wanted. Sure, the app wasn't as refined as it could have been but we still expected far more users. Looking back, one thing we never did was reach out to our initial users and ask for feedback. This time around, just last week, we launched the same service but in the form of a website (alwaysbuzzn.com) and have reached out to almost every one of our initial users to ask for their genuine feedback. Not only has it helped us iterate, but it has shown our users that we care about what they think and the word is spreading faster than ever. Sure, we can say the website is more effective than the app, but I still point our success to our attention to maximizing the user experience beyond anything else.

Nothing makes me feel better than hearing we have great customer service. You owe your clients great service. They're learning to use a new service that's constantly changing (sometimes for the worse) and dealing with your screw ups often. There are only so many times you can screw up with a client, but you can double that if you have great customer service.

The Zappos methodology is the best I've heard so far:

Every new hire spends at least 2 weeks answering phone calls. That's how they get everybody in the company to actually care about their customers.

Even big companies like Facebook, Google often have annoying, slow and unhelpful customer service.