11 Ways Your Startup Can Deliver Support That Will Increase Sales
//This post originally appeared at OnStartups, where all my writing appears exclusively.
upport is often an after thought for many startups in terms of the impact it has on your time, sanity, and development resources. It’s usually a tedious chore that is a second class citizen. Or…Maybe it’s not. Maybe your startup worships at the altar of Zappos. If you do, odds are the influx of support hits you from out of nowhere like a sucker punch. Here’s what I’ve learned about preparing for support, how it decreases churn, and increases sales.
Pre Sales Support Will Bring Up Patterns Of Lost Sales
Everyone seems to think that their funnel and their website copy is absolutely awesome. In reality, it comes down to not knowing what you don’t know. There are usage patterns that will cause confusion amongst potential purchasers of your product, that you could have never imagined. By implementing a strong pre-sales support system, you will start to gain pattern recognition into what is causing you to lose sales. The best way to catch these issues is to implement live chat systems like Olark, a phone system like Grasshopper, or a simple pre-sales FAQ.
Example: With PadPressed, many potential customers wanted to see a working demo on their iPad. We thought we had this clearly stated on the Demo page. As it turns out, we didn’t. After five requests in a day, we realized that we needed to heavily emphasize the working demo portion in the copy. We modified buttons on the homepage and we highlighted the links to the live demos on the Demo page. It worked. There have been more clicks and more requests about this.
Build As If You Have To Support It
I’m stealing this quote from Kevin Hale of Wufoo, but it’s truly one of the most important product focused quotes I’ve heard over the past year. Whenever you want to add a feature, especially the nifty ones that may be confusing or buggy, think about the impact that will have on support. Also think about a feature’s implementation and how it plays into cross platform compatibility. For every feature you plan on adding, expect more of the following:
- Extra support ticket requests ie- Each feature will bring about way more support tickets that require more time, which is something you’re already strapped on.
- More pre-launch documentation ie- You will have to spend more time on Q&A, writing documentation, doing tutorial videos, etc.
- More complexity in your sales and/or fundraising pitch ie- Your cool new features have nothing to do with your simple problem/solution statement.
Triage Critical Requests Post Launch and Freeze New Dev
After every launch of PadPressed, there are usually one to two specific problems that are major issues. For our most recent launch, the timthumb library was being wonky with WordPress MU + external images. Instead of adding some of the new things we had planned, we had to focus solely on releasing a major update for this issue. The adrenaline from a successful launch will lure you into wanting to do more “cool stuff” for customers. In reality, if you don’t double down on getting past the critical bugs, they won’t be customers for long.
The Knowledge Of The Customer Community Will Save You
If there’s a way to create a customer support forum, I strongly suggest it. It could be something like GetSatisfaction or it could be a private forum. Most problems that customers would normally open up a ticket with you for, will have been solved in the past and publicly available in the forums. I suggest that all tickets are made public and viewable by users. Another benefit of having a great community is the fact, that other customers will help out new customers and give suggestions. The math adds up over time. Here’s some math:
- Assume each support request takes an average of 15 minutes to deal with.
- You have a total of 400 support requests per month.
- 50% of those support requests could be solved by having past knowledge public. (200 total)
- That’s a total of 50 hours a month, which adds up to a lot of saved time, energy, and frustration.
Support Is A Reason To Charge
Support is a reason to charge, especially when dealing with a freemium model. As geeks, we may be able to do everything ourselves, but in the real world, most normals love to have their hand held or have someone on call to help them. You could charge for premium support or you can even bake it into your price. Apple’s genius bar and training programs seem free to customers, but they’re actually a good reason why Apple products command such a premium. Look at Zappos as well. They spend good money on providing a first class support experience and it’s why they’re able to do so well. Once again, THEY SELL SHOES. The support experience has allowed them to command a dominate spot in the market and differentiate themselves by selling shoes. Apple and Zappos’ models are indirect ways to charge for support. Many open source and freemium companies charge directly for support and make big bucks doing it. Some may say that this model doesn’t scale, but I say baloney. We’re a connected and distributed world where there is an infinite amount of labor on demand to help with support.
Escalate With Discretion
As a startup with strapped development resources, escalating issues to the development team requires a certain graceful balance. Certain critical issues and larger customers require you to bring issues to the attention of the core dev team. The problem is, attending to these issues can slow down new development and an already large onslaught of bug fixes. This is also another area where you can charge for a more advanced level of support.
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