Customer support and, in a broader view, customer service can be considered a “make or break” factor when deciding whether to patronize a brand or company; they are important. These days, however, good customer support is lauded and placed on the pedestal too much, ignoring the fact that the best customer support is actually customer support that is not needed. Most people just want to find out the information they want or do what they came to your website to do without having to contact anyone, no matter how quick, effective, or friendly the person on the other end is.

We run a young daily deal platform where the only way we can improve our product is to have constant feedback from our early customers so that we can build something that is wanted by the market. We thus treated customer support queries and customer feedback as reasons to be happy – people are interested in our product, people are engaged with our product, and, now that they have made first contact, we can even show them how quickly and effectively we solve problems for them! The truth is that having to contact anyone on anything is an absolute pain. Quick, effective customer support is simply the best apology that the vendor can offer – a weak compromise – for providing a product, service, website, ebook, game, etc. that basically does not do what it is supposed to do (hence the need to shoot off an email or make a phone call to the vendor).

There are really two broad strategies that a company can employ with regard to customer support: 1) accept that customer support is inevitable, a norm, part and parcel of running a business, and focus on offering the best customer service standards, and 2) treat customer support queries as anomalies or bug reports (preventative customer support), where preventive action ought to be taken by rectifying the “bugs” that precipitated the customer support queries in the first place. Of course, to say that customer support is an anomaly is far-fetched – big customer support departments exist even in the most successful companies out there, e.g. Google, PayPal, Amazon, etc. (though note Amazon’s actual stand on this issue – founder and CEO Jeff Bezos said that “[o]ur version of a perfect customer experience is one in which our customer doesn’t want to talk to us. Every time a customer contacts us, we see it as a defect. I’ve been saying for many, many years, people should talk to their friends, not their merchants. And so we use all of our customer service information to find the root cause of any customer contact.”) The best customer support strategy, in our view, is, unsurprisingly, a hybrid – cure the “bug” that precipitated the customer support query in the first place while being quick, effective, and friendly.

Some companies (deliberately) misinterpret the concept of preventative customer support by making it laborious and difficult for customers to contact them, with methods including hiding email addresses, forcing customers to use a customer support portal ticket system, making the abovementioned process long with many fields to fill up, etc., and then concluding that the lack of customer support queries means that the product is relatively faultless. This form of fake prevention will only cripple the company in question in the long run, because crucial learning points are blocked off and filtered out by an intimidating customer support process. The best way to know if the offering is good is to make it ridiculously easy for people to contact you and at the same time getting a very low number of customer support queries (“you guys are awesome” emails do not count). That way we know that people are not contacting you because there is no need to, not because it is a pain to do so.

Customer support is not a good thing, all in all. It is a glaring symptom of a poorly-made product. People are buying a product after all, and the overwhelming majority of people would choose a good product with poor customer support over a poor product with good customer support (because, really, a good product does not need customer support). Ultimately, customer support is a means to an end – it is a qualitative system for product testing and feedback that should be used to improve the product until, ideally, no one has any more bugs to report.

P.S. I made a distinction between customer support and customer service, because the former is the activity of providing help to a customer who asked for it, while the latter is really a spirit, a culture that is embedded in everything a company does (of which customer support is a small part). Needless to say, good customer service should always permeate throughout any organization that wants to succeed.

Customer feedback is important to any business, more so to new businesses. With an emerging glut of daily deal websites, daily deal websites that bother finding out what they can do better will stand out and build better customer loyalty. It is more important to engage those who have actually paid you money than those who have simply showed interest in your daily deal website. Paying customers are people who have been through the full process of browsing, purchasing, and redeeming deals on your website and thus have more credibility.

While Facebook and Twitter may be appropriate channels for feedback acquisition, one-on-one feedback channels, such as email or even Skype, may be better ways to obtain candid, honest feedback. Certain daily deal websites may resort to half-hearted, pseudo-big corp methods of acquiring feedback, such as inflexible survey forms, but the better daily deal website owners know that human-to-human interaction always results in the most effective exchange of thoughts and ideas.

Some ways to follow up include offering a gift voucher (or even purchase credits) for a 15-minute chat on Skype and interacting with customers on the pretext of something else (customer support, holiday greetings, newsletter updates, etc.). Anyone who is willing to engage with your business is providing insights for strategic decision-making. However, an important skill to employ is to analyze feedback prudently (whether a given piece of feedback is peculiar or representative of other customers) and then formulate actionable plans to address said feedback. In our experience, anytime we hear a piece of feedback twice or more times, we treat it as representative of a segment of our customers.

It is safe to say that not many businesses bother to follow up with customers further down the sales funnel, partly because of complacency, i.e. they are already paying customers! It is too easy to just focus on getting new subscribers and buyers onboard without sufficiently tending to existing customers who have been providing revenue for your daily deal website. Sometimes the bottleneck of your daily deal business may be that the user experience is just sub-optimal – and only people who have been with you for a while and purchased your deals would be able to tell you why and how to improve.

I have always believed that businesses – no matter which industry they operate in, what stage they are in, or how profitable they are – cannot be complacent about one question: “is there a demand for what is being sold?” It may seem like a distracting question to ask, especially when the business is doing well, but, the moment businesses stop asking themselves this question, businesses lose touch with what the market wants – perhaps not immediately, but gradually. Not understanding customers well enough is a chief reason of failure for most new businesses.

For daily deal businesses, it is easy to slide into the assumption that, because some consumers have signed up for the newsletter, they are very likely to be interested in whatever is on offer. But vendors are blinded by their own offering – the florist would always praise his own flowers. Entrepreneurs new to the industry would think it is a simple task to get people to hand over their hard-earned money. Groupon is making a lot of dough, so it could not be that hard, could it? Just slap on a deal on the home page, shoot off a bunch of emails, and they will all buy in droves, right?

Not really. Business is hard, and one of the best ways to make it easier is to communicate often with the people from whom you want money. Very few businesses are willing to get close and personal with their customers, and, while not all customers appreciate businesses being proactive (think pesky-sales assistant proactive), those who do present an opportunity to businesses to study and analyze their customers’ wants and needs. Talking to customers may be largely futile – at worst – but think of the possible market insights that can be obtained from even a few obliging customers. It is the cheapest, most instant, and most reliable way to find out if customers even want what is being sold, along with the “why” or “why not.”

It surprises me that some businesses can go through one working day (let alone several working days) without any of its employees speaking or interacting with a customer. We ourselves do not claim to understand our customers very well, but we are trying our best not to forgo any opportunity to learn from our customers. For us, at Zuupy, we try to make it a lifestyle, a habit, and a culture to grab hold of every possible opportunity to get close with our customers. Customer support email? Great, a good opportunity to interact with customers and hear their grievances. Numbers going down? Shoot them emails and ask them what went wrong. Holiday season coming soon? Send them greeting cards, wish them well, and take the chance to remind them of our progress and maybe give away some freebies.

The moral of the story is, simply, you cannot understand your customers enough. Keep learning. We are trying to. You should too.

I recently came across the idea that customer support queries indicate that the product is “buggy” in a special way – it is not user-friendly enough. In most industries that sell as-a-service products, customer support is almost a default operation within companies assumed to be necessary and indispensable. What if these companies changed their paradigms, discard the cynicism that no matter how good they make the product, there will be slow customers who just do not get it, and treat every customer support query as a bug report?

Our experience has shown that customers are just as eager to help themselves whenever possible as we as vendors are to help our customers be as independent as possible when using the product. Thus, improving the documentation, user interface, and general ease of “understandability” is actually, or at least ostensibly, a win-win proposition. The fact is that, as customer support queries decrease, customer support costs decrease and profits increase.

Yet the resultant lack of interaction with customers also has a cost – vendors speak to their customers less and thus understand them less. In fact, as businesses, vendors lose valuable opportunities to showcase their top-grade service and thus lose opportunities to convert prospects into buyers and buyers into repeat buyers. Customer support can be a big difference-maker and competitive advantage.

How do you view customer support?

We recently received an enquiry from a prospective customer, asking us the difference between our daily deal platform and a competitor’s. It seemed like a reasonable question for a buyer to ask, but it led us to ask ourselves the crucial soul-searching question, “What is our advantage compared to our competitors?” Why should our customers choose us and then stick with us for the long term?

Our answer centered on two points: quality of customer service and risk factor. Here is what we said about our customer service:

“The other difference is customer support. We answer emails quickly (basically with the promptness with which we answered this email), and all our developers also double as customer service officers as a matter of company policy. So the people you're talking to can actually go into the code and fix things or add features as you need them. Quickly. Sometimes in hours.”

On risk factor, we stressed the importance of a low-risk entry point into a relatively-young market and of a quick route-to-market. Large upfront costs consume vital capital that is most likely scarce, and – let us face it – any player just entering a new market, no matter how experienced in adjacent industries, will be experimenting in the early stages of the business. Experimentation should not involve large amounts of capital. We are learning as much as our customers are learning, given how new the market is.

We provide our customers a commercially-prudent solution to get started quickly and cheaply, and we roll out the important-yet-not-indispensable bells and whistles to customers who are already doing well in the later stages. This is also the reason that we do not always win in a feature-to-feature battle with our competitors; other daily deal platforms boast an assortment of powerful features. Yet few vendors realize that, for a customer with limited technical knowledge who is just getting started with selling online, a giant array of features is more overwhelming and discouraging than anything else.

At the end of the day, really, our company philosophy is that we care, and we care genuinely. Revenue and profit are just means for us to gather and deploy the resources necessary to serve them better. We know that the quality of the product is only half of the offering; the other part comprises service, which is why we invariably pride ourselves in treating and serving customers with respect, courtesy, expediency, and reliability.

Vendor lock-in is rampant in the software and hardware industries. The most common tactics include high switching costs, data lock-in, lack of cross-vendor compatibility, long-term contracts and other payment shenanigans, etc. Most suppliers employ some sort of lock-in strategy – whether consciously or subconsciously – to ensure that their customers stay with them (regardless of the quality of their offering), which basically reeks of coercion. Coercion is, alas, unsustainable.

We believe that the single best vendor lock-in strategy is good customer service. It is easier said than done, but friendly and effective customer service is still rare in business today. Customer service is not exactly a scalable strategy, considering that it takes the entire company to unfailingly adhere to a strict set of standards in serving its customers. Yet if it is successfully baked into the company culture and practiced consistently (e.g. Zappos), it would make a substantial difference in how customers feel like they are treated. People routinely pay good money for good treatment; we all know that.

What then constitutes good customer service? The most vital ingredient, in our opinion, is speed. When a customer needs assistance or wants information, nothing helps more than knowing that her issue is urgent enough for the company’s staff to get back to her almost immediately. The customer service officer does not have to solve the problem on the spot, but that someone cares and wants to help is amazingly reassuring. Even just a simple “we’ll get back to you very soon, we take your concerns very seriously” provides some sort of temporary relief.

The other vital ingredient is effectiveness or the ability to solve the customer’s problem. In the software industry especially, customers need people who can actually go into the code/database and fix things instead of rattling off a bunch of memorized, pre-prepared instructions that any literate person can read from the documentation. It makes sense to let the technical staff take care of technical problems directly for two reasons: 1) the technical staff becomes more aware of the issues happening upon release, guiding them in their future work, and 2) the technical staff is practically the only truly-qualified people to do the job.

The final ingredient to good customer service is an assurance or some form of special treatment. Explain that the situation is deeply-regretted and give reasonable assurances that the problem will never happen again, with concrete steps or follow-up actions that you will take to give credence to your guarantee. Give VIP treatment from time-to-time: freebies are the most common effective way of making the customer feel appreciated.

The fact is that good customer service is rare, yet really sought-after by customers with money to pay for good service, thus it is very valuable as a business strategy. Good customer service is often overlooked, as companies disproportionately invest their resources in improving their products, not really realizing that good customer service is really an indispensable part of the whole offering.

Want to lock your customers in or, more accurately, make your customers willingly lock themselves in? Then treat them well, very well.

Someone once said to me, “There are only three value propositions that you can offer when selling to a business: [help it to] make money, save money, or save time.” It made some sense, because businesses are artificial constructs that, as diverse as they are in terms of industry, size, and culture, ultimately aim to generate profits. That is the raison d’etre of a business underneath their self-proclaimed lofty-high visions and missions. Businesses are as economically rational as real-life entities can be.

Just as we can tell what businesses want by examining their underlying purpose and goal, we can tell what consumers want by examining their underlying purpose and goal. The only problem is that consumers (and indeed people) vary widely in their objectives in life, so any attempt at distilling trends is probably useful only as interesting reading material at best, not a strategic guide. The right question to ask when faced with such information is not “Is this information useful?” but “Is this information applicable to my specific industry and set of customers?”

There is no short cut when it comes to knowing what consumers want – what they want varies so widely and changes so frequently that finding out what consumers want will necessarily be a laborious, continuous, non-scalable process. Fortunately, there exists a universal (and arguably indispensable) method to unfailingly find out that information: cultivating relationships. Consumers are people after all. The more time and effort we spend with them, the more we learn about their wants and needs, even (and some say especially) if we do not ask them directly. No one likes to be dissected with blunt little tools, such as interrogative questions.

Some may say that cultivating relationships with customers goes without saying and that they have been doing it more than enough. Others may say that it works only for B2C businesses or small businesses or specific industries or geographical markets. I say, no. All of business requires trust, and trust can only come from effective relationships. Even large, multi-national businesses are made up of people.

In fact, we have been selling to small businesses for some time now, and the important thing that we have learnt after interacting with literally hundreds of customers is that there is no room for complacency when it comes to understanding the customer. You cannot understand your customers enough; there is always more to learn, and every ounce of knowledge makes a measurable difference to your business, as if there is no saturation point.

Understanding the customer is something even highly-profitable companies should never overlook or belittle. For the rest of us, perhaps it is wise to double or triple our investment into understanding our customers (if our existing methods are working) or change our existing methods if they are not.