So far during my time at Teespring, my most striking observation has been the importance of great customer service. Every conversation at work is laced with the subtext of improving customers’ experience, and every employee does customer service at one point or another. Good customer service helps you understand your customers, define your company, and grow your business, and should be nurtured carefully.
Every single employee at Amazon - even Jeff Bezos - spends at least two days per year doing customer service. A lot of interesting things start to happen when people from every part of a company take the time to interface directly with customers. Maybe a product person realizes a clearer way to present users with the information they care about, or an operations person recognizes that a certain supplier is causing too many problems. In these kinds of ways, customer service helps you define your business.
When the entire company is relentlessly focused on serving customers, the company's value proposition tends to increase. Great customer service is not just a department, it’s a characteristic of a company that focuses on its customer’s needs and works backwards from there. It should appear in all parts of the company, the way that the DNA encoding your eye color can be found in every one of your cells.
Good customer service drives growth
Good customer service can do as much to grow your company as any other avenue. Not only does it increase your user retention by keeping existing customers happy, but it also creates an army of advocates who will tell their friends by word of mouth how much they enjoyed their experience.
As a driver of growth, word of mouth has a very special quality; as your service grows, you get more advocates. Ideally, you retain a constant ratio of advocates to users; e.g. 20% of your users generate a new user in any given month. This is why startups with very happy customers tend to grow exponentially.
Growth is the silver bullet that solves all problems in a startup, and customer service is one of the best ways to get growth.
Just because it’s easy to do customer service doesn’t mean it’s easy to do well
Customer service is an essential business function. In fact, customer service is the essential business function; serving customers is what makes you a business. Because of this, it deserves incredible attention.
Too often, people dismiss customer service as one of the softer sides of business. Decent customer service is easy, but great customer service is hard - companies like Amazon pour massive time and financial resources into getting it right.
There is an erroneous tendency to give less credit to activities that have a lower barrier to entry. Anyone can play chess, but becoming a grand master is extremely difficult. Even though customer service is easy to do moderately, companies should invest heavily in doing it well.