One of the more interesting things about having a portfolio of clients, as we do at Vertical Leap, is that you tend to encounter businesses at different stages of their existence; some are mature businesses, some are primarily bricks and mortar, some are service providers. And some are early stage start ups. One thing that all successful companies have in common is that at some stage, they’ll need to hire some customer service staff.
Now, at this stage, a number of companies are happy to hire one or two low cost employees, who’ll perform basic customer interactions and, hopefully just keep things ticking along, but not much more. This is fine, as far as it goes. I’m very much of the opinion, however, that you’ll get better value, and indeed, have a lower total outlay in the long run, by paying a little bit more and getting more skilled people on board.
In a very real sense, your customer service team is both your spokesperson and the advance guard of your marketing; investing in these is an investment in the company as a whole, not just an investment in answering emails, or telephones. This ties in with a blog I wrote a little while back about user generated content – namely, that the best marketing data is that which comes from your customers, unvarnished and unprompted. By having the right people in position, you’re able to collect this data and use it to guide your business, making it more efficient and reducing the number of customer interactions that are necessary to deliver a satisfactory product.
It’s also a great way to get talent into your company at an early stage, too; it’s much easier, say, to hire a new customer service representative than it is to hire a product developer who already knows your systems.
I guess, in part, my view on this comes from a desire to see search engine optimisation happen from the perspective of creating a website, a product experience, that customers will find satisfying, and hence be far more likely to link to. To me, this is all built on little things, and putting in place an institutional structure that says ‘the staff we have that talk to customers are very important to us, not just an afterthought’ is a very big part of that. Being able to attract and retain in the long term the right staff members in a customer facing capacity is the foundation of this.
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