Get obsessed with customer service
Startups are hard because even the startups that do an incredible job can die. Valar morghulis, all startups must die. At The Family, that’s led us to understand a few lessons.
One is that you have to put a ton of effort into customer service when you’re a startup, because it’s what lets you do things that other companies can’t. When you have a few hundred clients, you can do things that are really magical; when you have tens of thousands, it’s much more complicated.
As a client, we’re all getting more and more impossible to deal with, we’re super sensitive. Before there was a relationship between the price you paid and the quality you got. But then people started to provide incredible services, lots of them for free. Startups are part of that, giving people things that are better and cheaper. That combination creates things nobody would have imagined. At Amazon, for example, Prime became the norm. But years ago, the first e-commerce site took 4 weeks for delivery on average, and everybody was so amazed.
Take another example, the taxis. Heetch is one of our portfolio companies, they let individuals give other individuals rides home in their normal car. Back in 2016, the big taxi battle ended up in a meeting with the prime minister, Manuel Valls. There’s this big debate, and then we took a break, everybody went out to have a smoke. To lighten the mood a bit, I asked where they were going on vacation — and where they bought their tickets. Because it’s a little odd to defend the taxis and then use Expedia to book your vacation. What about the travel agents? If you don’t see that it’s the same thing, that’s a problem — it’s all part of the same phenomenon, destruction and creation.
But obviously resistance to change is natural. We see it even with kids — have you ever tried to give a kid something new to eat? We only get used to change by doing it. That’s the meritocracy of startups, in that people vote with their time and money, which creates the pressure needed for change.
And that’s where customer service becomes critical. The typical entrepreneur is someone with lots of optimism, who thinks they can do better than everybody else, and then reality comes along to smack them in the face. People don’t click where they should, they don’t know how to use the product, and they express themselves — a lot. Before, when a client felt they’d been treated badly, nothing happened. Now, if your social media account speaks poorly to someone, you can get a crowd protesting outside your office.
This is a service culture that hasn’t changed just because of what people demand, but of where the power is. Customer service isn’t just an extra part of your relationship with the client anymore, it’s a question of economic survival.
It’s serious. A while back, an airline company broke one of its customers’ guitars, and offered him a voucher for $20. The guy made a video, it went viral, and within days the CEO had to apologize publicly and then bought him a new guitar. The stock tanked, and there was talk of firing the CEO. So if any random customer now has the power to kick you out of your job, you better take care of them.
That gives startups an advantage — you can create your customer service from the ground up. That’s how Trainline was able to compete with the SNCF — they didn’t have a massive operation already, people who had been doing customer service in person for years when the internet came along. That meant Trainline could do it right the first time. They brought on machine learning experts and recruited people who’d never dreamed of working in customer support. The people providing support were experts in their field, which let them give an exceptional experience.
The worst thing you can do is to have customer service that is robotic — whether it’s actual bots or just people who act like robots. It’s the big question of our times: how do you create authenticity, how do you put care into something that’s seen as just a support function? Startups have to put heart into every part of their business, whether it’s finance, HR, product, or customer care. They’re obligated to do something incredible if they want to win, which is why so much time and effort are put into the customer experience.
Wanna really turn up your customer care? I’ll be talking at our Customer Experience Summit along with a ton of top level experts (like the head of CX at Slack!) on June 18, online and directly into your living room, no matter where you are 💗 Tickets are free, join us 🤗
